The Disturbing Aftermath of 9/11. Stephen Lendman. Sept 11, 2017.
The day will live in infamy, the attacks planned well in advance. Bin Laden and so-called “crazed Arabs” had nothing to do with destroying the twin towers and striking the Pentagon.
The Big Lie persists. Most Americans no longer believe the the 9/11 whitewash commission’s official account of what happened.
Bin Laden was an unwitting CIA asset transformed into “Enemy Number One.” In December 2001, he died of natural causes in a Pakistani hospital, widely reported at the time – including by The New York Times (several months later), Fox News and the BBC.
Obama didn’t kill Osama. In September 2001, CBS News anchor Dan Rather said he was admitted to a Rawalpindi, Pakistan hospital on September 10, 2001. France’s Le Figaro reported:
“Dubai…was the backdrop of a secret meeting between Osama bin Laden and the local CIA agent in July (2001).”
“A partner of the administration of the American Hospital…claims that (bin Laden) stayed (there) between the 4th and 14th of July (and) received visits from many members of his family as well as prominent Saudis and Emiratis.”
“(During the same period), the local CIA agent, known to many in Dubai, was seen taking (the hospital’s) main elevator (to) bin Laden’s room.”
Pakistani intelligence confirmed his December 2001 death. Yet the myth of his responsibility for 9/11 persists. The FBI later admitted it had no evidence linking him to the attack.
The official 9/11 account was fabricated to conceal state-sponsored terrorism, dark forces in Washington responsible for what happened.
It became a pretext for waging endless wars on humanity at home and abroad. It was the wrong time to be Muslim in America.
They’ve been disgracefully victimized, vilified, and persecuted for their faith, ethnicity, prominence, activism, and charity – innocent men and women bogusly called terrorists, used for political advantage.
More than any other ethnic/religious group, Western discourse unfairly portrays Muslim Arabs stereotypically as culturally inferior, dirty, lecherous, untrustworthy, religiously fanatical, and violent.
Ongoing US wars against predominantly Muslim countries, along with Trump’s travel ban against targeted Islamic ones is a cross millions of people threatening no one are forced to bear because of Washington’s imperial ruthlessness.
Following 9/11, America became a fascist police state. GW Bush’s declared war on terrorism was US state-sponsored terrorism on humanity.
A week after 9/11, congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) declared it – on the phony pretext of combating forces “responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States.”
Bush/Cheney took full advantage – flagrantly abusing executive power, most congressional members acting as co-conspirators.
Bush/Cheney’s Military Order Number 1 let them usurp authority to capture, kidnap or otherwise arrest any non-citizens (later citizens as well) anywhere in the world if involved in international terrorism – real or fabricated – holding them indefinitely without charge, due process or judicial fairness.
Obama further institutionalized indefinite detentions and military commission injustice, violating America’s Fifth Amendment protections.
Post-9/11, torture became official US policy, Guantanamo symbolizing ruthless injustice against Muslims in nearly all cases guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, uninvolved in violence or other criminal actions.
Anyone designated a threat to US national security is vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment and indefinite detention – how police states operate worldwide.
Post-9/11, the unpatriotic Patriot Act (prepared months in advance), Homeland Security Act, National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directives, the Detainee Treatment Act, Military Commissions Act, amending the 1807 Insurrection Act and 1878 Posse Comitatus protections, Big Brother spying on Americans and others worldwide, police state presidential executive orders, criminalizing peaceful protests, and other harsh measures transformed America into a fascist police state – with bipartisan support.
It continues under Trump. Full scale militarization of the country is the law of the land – at the federal, state and local levels, constitutional rights increasingly ignored.
Everyone everywhere suffers from US imperial arrogance. Neocons in charge threaten world peace.
Their rage for unchallenged global dominance risks potentially catastrophic nuclear war – sovereign independent Russia, China and Iran potential targets
State-sponsored 9/11 made America unsafe and unfit to live in. Full-blown tyranny may be another major false flag away, possibly happening any time.
We Need to Admit the Government Story About 9/11 is Bullshit. Michael Krieger. Sept. 11, 2017.
It wasn’t just me of course. It was an entire nation that was callously manipulated in the aftermath of that tragedy. The courage and generosity exhibited by so many New Yorkers and others throughout the country and indeed the world was rapidly transformed into terrifying fear. Fear that was intentionally injected repeatedly into our daily lives. Fear that translated into pointless wars and countless deaths. Fear that was used to justify the destruction of our precious civil rights. Fear that was used to initiate a gigantic power grab and the source of tremendous profits for the corporate-statists and crony-capitalsits. Unfortunately, that is the greatest legacy of 9/11.
– From my 2013 post: How I Remember September 11, 2001
Unless we come to terms with 9/11 and the obvious fact that the official government story is a ridiculous fairytale, it’ll be hard for our nation to move forward in an intelligent, courageous and ethical manner. Many of the most destructive trends which have defined our post September 11, 2001 environment, such as a loss of civill liberties and endless barbaric wars of aggression abroad, have been directly related to our false understanding of that awful terrorist attack. As I’ve always maintained, I have no idea what really went down on that day, I just know that the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies are not being honest.
9/11: The Beginning of the End of the US Empire Project. Dahr Jamail, Truthout. Sept. 11, 2017.
The Bush/Cheney administration used these horrible events to justify projecting the US empire deeper into the Middle East by invading Iraq, as well as launching into war-torn Afghanistan. They also used the opportunity to pass the so-called PATRIOT act, which amounted to a vicious attack on civil liberties and human rights at home.
Any pretense that the US intended to seek justice or increase world stability via its so-called War on Terror has been dramatically overshadowed by increased global resentment toward the US, which has in fact generated more terror attacks around the world.
It is precisely this legacy that continues today: ongoing US military violence abroad, increased domestic surveillance and repression at home, and a world more violent and less safe for all.
The Numbers
Having reported from Iraq, on and off between 2003 and 2013, I witnessed the ravages of US imperialism abroad firsthand.
Reporting from inside Fallujah during the April 2004 US military siege of that city, I watched women, children and elderly people being brought, dead or alive, into a small makeshift clinic. Most of them had been shot by US military snipers, while drones buzzed above and US warplanes roared in the distance.
When the US military failed to take the city that month, a truce was called as the US waited for Bush to be reelected later that year. Days after the election, the US military laid siege to that city, committing war crimes while slaughtering thousands of civilians.
Six months later, I co-authored a piece with Jonathan Steele for the Guardian, and called Fallujah a "monument to brutality" of the US empire. "In the 1930s the Spanish city of Guernica became a symbol of wanton murder and destruction," we wrote. "In the 1990s Grozny was cruelly flattened by the Russians; it still lies in ruins. This decade's unforgettable monument to brutality and overkill is Fallujah, a text-book case of how not to handle an insurgency, and a reminder that unpopular occupations will always degenerate into desperation and atrocity."
As the US occupation of Iraq ground on, the numbers of civilians killed by the US military and other violence that wracked the country reached apocalyptic totals.
Authors of a report titled "Body Count: Casualty Figures After 10 Years of the 'War on Terror,'" told Truthout the numbers of dead in Iraq and other countries the US had waged war on since the events of September 11 had reached "genocidal dimensions" and "could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely."
...
Even before 9/11, the Bush administration was being heavily criticized around the world for the US government's positions on both domestic and international issues. US policies that were furthering poverty, inequality, geopolitical conflict, environmental degradation and globalization were all hot-button issues, which were exacerbated by the US's response to 9/11.
In the US, Amnesty International even argued that the so-called War on Terror, "'far from making the world a safer place, has made it more dangerous by curtailing human rights, undermining the rule of international law and shielding governments from scrutiny. It has deepened divisions among people of different faiths and origins, sowing the seeds for more conflict. The overwhelming impact of all this is genuine fear -- among the affluent as well as the poor."
Human Rights Watch, in a 2004 report titled, "Above the Law: Executive Power after September 11 in the United States," stated, "The Bush administration's anti-terrorism practices represent a stunning assault on basic principles of justice, government accountability, and the role of the courts."
In the US, Amnesty International even argued that the so-called War on Terror, "'far from making the world a safer place, has made it more dangerous by curtailing human rights, undermining the rule of international law and shielding governments from scrutiny. It has deepened divisions among people of different faiths and origins, sowing the seeds for more conflict. The overwhelming impact of all this is genuine fear -- among the affluent as well as the poor."
Human Rights Watch, in a 2004 report titled, "Above the Law: Executive Power after September 11 in the United States," stated, "The Bush administration's anti-terrorism practices represent a stunning assault on basic principles of justice, government accountability, and the role of the courts."
How 9/11 continues to kill. Craig MacKee, Truth and Shadows. Sep. 5, 2017.
Lies can kill. And few lies have killed more than those disguised as the “truth” about what happened on September 11, 2001.
Today, more than 15 years after 9/11, exposing those lies is as relevant and necessary as ever. Not only does the false official narrative about what brought the World Trade Center towers down continue to claim victims in the global “war on terror,” but the false claims about the air quality at Ground Zero on 9/11 and in the weeks and months that followed are still killing hundreds and making thousands of others seriously ill.
The numbers of first responders, recovery workers, and residents of lower Manhattan who are affected aren’t falling; they’re rising sharply. Even those exposed to the toxic dust and air at Ground Zero who have not become sick have no way of knowing whether that day is lying in wait.
It’s a grim and very sad picture. And it’s made worse by the fact that the public knows so little about what these people are facing. The media have consistently steered attention away from any challenges to the 9/11 official line offered by the government. And this has caused yet more death and pain for those who were there and for the victims’ families as they continue to fight to have their plight recognized.
Few of us are aware that more than 75,000 have registered for the World Trade Center Health Program and that about half of those have contracted a wide range of diseases, from asthma to pulmonary disease, from gastric reflux to psychological ailments like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. As of the summer of 2016, more than 1,100 individuals who had inhaled the WTC dust had died from 9/11-related diseases.
Public health physician Jonathan Weisbuch, who founded Medical Professionals for 9/11 Truth and is a current member of the 9/11 Consensus Panel, said in an interview that not nearly enough study has been done on the injuries and illnesses suffered at Ground Zero on 9/11. Weisbuch says he knew something was wrong when reports of illnesses emerged from not only rescue and recovery workers but also from those who lived or worked in the area.
“There were reports of health problems — asthmatic problems, lung problems, and so on — and so I said there’s something more going on here,” he recounts. In fact, it was in part his concern about these illnesses, he explains, that led him to form Medical Professionals for 9/11 Truth.
Weisbuch asserts that the failure of authorities to properly investigate the real cause of the high-rise buildings’ fall has had direct health consequences for both those who are already sick and those who will become sick in the future. If investigators were to look beyond the official explanation of plane impacts, he says, they might better understand some of the direct causes of illness — causes they have thus far been unwilling to consider.
For example, says Weisbuch, the iron microspheres that have been identified by a team of scientists in the Ground Zero dust had to have been created by the use of thermite or nano-thermite in the controlled demolition of the towers — and possibly led to the symptoms found in many victims of 9/11-related illnesses.
Calls for quick clean up to blame?
Steven Jonas, professor emeritus of Stony Brook University School of Medicine’s Department of Preventive Medicine and the Program in Public Health, suggests that officials’ urgency to remove the forensic evidence from Ground Zero quickly could have had a lot to do with why workers were not kept away from the site for their own safety.
“The role of [New York City Mayor Rudy] Giuliani is absolutely critical,” Dr. Jonas said in an interview. “For one thing, [Giuliani] said there’s nothing to worry about. Second thing is that Giuliani made sure to clean up as much of the wreckage as possible so that it could never be examined forensically.
“What [Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd] Whitman and Giuliani did,” he continues, “has affected the lives of thousands, if not tens of thousands, in terms of their health.”
While the U.S. government and the corporate-controlled mainstream media would have us believe that the deaths and illnesses from Ground Zero are the result of the impact of two Boeing 767 airliners on and resulting fires in the Twin Towers, the abundance of forensic evidence compiled by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and other researchers demonstrates that the official version of events cannot be true. (As we know, WTC 7, which fell in the late afternoon of 9/11, was not hit by an airplane.) This physical evidence clearly shows that the three World Trade Center towers were deliberately demolished using explosives that had to have been planted in the buildings prior to that day.
Also false was the government’s claim that recovery workers and those living near Ground Zero in 2001 had nothing to fear from breathing the air in the aftermath of the event.
As early as September 13, 2001, the EPA was reporting that asbestos levels around Ground Zero were “generally low.” A press release dated September 18 included this statement from EPA chief Whitman: “Given the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, DC that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink.”
But it wasn’t. One is left wondering how many people have died or become seriously ill because of that false assurance.
A 2003 report by the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General stated that the White House Council on Environmental Quality pressured the EPA to add “reassuring statements” to agency press releases and to “delete cautionary ones.” The report specified that some EPA press releases had in fact been altered before being made public because of White House pressure.
Four years later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit threw out a class-action lawsuit against Whitman, citing the importance of returning the City of New York to a normal routine as quickly as possible. In his 2007 decision, the circuit’s chief judge, Dennis Jacobs wrote:
“Can the goals of a government policy possibly outweigh a known risk of loss of life or bodily harm? The EPA and other federal agencies often must decide whether to regulate particular conduct by taking into account whether the risk to the potentially affected population will be acceptable. Such decisions require an exercise of the conscience, but such decisions cannot be deemed egregious, conscience-shocking, and “arbitrary in the constitutional sense” . . . merely because they contemplate some likelihood of bodily harm. Moreover, mass displacement, civil disorder and economic chaos in an urban area also can result in bodily harm and loss of life.”
He added: “When great harm is likely to befall someone no matter what a government official does, the allocation of risk may be a burden on the conscience of the one who must make such decisions, but does not shock the contemporary conscience.”
Also in 2007, Whitman was called to testify before a congressional committee. When questioned, she maintained that she had done nothing wrong when she told the public that the air around Ground Zero was safe to breathe and the water safe to drink.
To this day, Whitman contends that her job was to pass along to the public information from qualified scientists about the air quality at the site. But in September 2016 she apologized for the first time to those who have become ill, admitting that the information she had been given was incorrect.
“I’m very sorry that people are sick,” she said. “I’m very sorry that people are dying and if the EPA and I in any way contributed to that, I’m sorry. We did the very best we could at the time with the knowledge we had.”
Newsweek published an article in July 2016 titled “911’s second wave: cancer and other diseases linked to the 2001 attacks are surging.” Its author, Leah McGrath Goodman, reported that, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, there were 411 deaths among rescue and recovery workers on 9/11 but that the number of workers who have since succumbed exceeds 1,100. Goodman also related that doctors with the World Trade Center Health Program have linked more than 70 types of cancers to Ground Zero exposure.
As of June 2016, more than 5,400 of the individuals diagnosed with cancers directly related to 9/11 have enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program (WTCHP). That figure is roughly triple the 1,822 who had signed up for the program as of January 2014.
Mount Sinai Hospital’s Dr. Michael Crane, who works with the WTCHP, told Newsweek that he sees 10–15 new cases of cancer among first responders every week. Crane lists some of the materials recovery workers breathed in, both on and after September 11, 2001:
“We will never know the composition of that cloud, because the wind carried it away, but people were breathing and eating it. What we do know is that it had all kinds of god-awful things in it. Burning jet fuel. Plastics, metal, fiberglass, asbestos. It was thick, terrible stuff. A witch’s brew.”
One such victim was artist Janette MacKinlay, whose apartment building stood very close to the World Trade Center. In 2010 MacKinlay died of brain cancer that appears to have been caused by her exposure to the toxic Ground Zero environment. MacKinlay was well known — and greatly admired — within the 9/11 Truth Movement, in part for having had the presence of mind to collect dust samples from the destruction of the towers. She sent those samples to Dr. Steven Jones, one of the co-authors of the research paper “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe.”
Another victim of the dangerous environment at Ground Zero who, like MacKinlay, decided to take action was John Feal, a demolition supervisor who started working at the site the day after 9/11. Feal had to have half of his left foot amputated after it was crushed by a metal beam in the rubble. He subsequently created the Feal Good Foundation, an organization that fights for healthcare and compensation for those who have become ill.
“My illness pales in comparison to those who are deathly ill and dying,” Feal said in one TV interview. “These men and women deserve better, and that’s why I started my foundation.”
“I don’t take medication for my post traumatic, I was diagnosed by four doctors with it, but running my foundation and helping people is my therapy and to prove that I wasn’t sick like everybody but to raise awareness I even donated a kidney. And since I donated that kidney, so many 9/11 responders are now getting kidney transplants.”
What has been done?
For a good part of the more than 15 years since 9/11, a fight has been underway to gain compensation and medical care for those whose health has been affected by their exposure to the toxic air at Ground Zero. Victories have come, but slowly, and not without a sustained fight. These efforts have involved lawsuits, a settlement, a piece of legislation, and an ongoing program managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Since 2003, numerous lawsuits have been filed by firefighters, police officers, construction workers, and emergency responders against the City of New York and against various companies hired to remove debris from Ground Zero. One major suit resulted in a 2010 settlement of $657.5 million that was distributed among 10,000 plaintiffs. The settlement includes $23.4 million designated for illnesses that have yet to be diagnosed or that may occur in the future.
Meanwhile, a federal bill called the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, which provides health care to those with 9/11-related illnesses, has become law. It was named after the first New York City police officer to die from exposure to the air at Ground Zero. James Zadroga, a detective, spent hundreds of hours at Ground Zero looking for survivors.
Though the act was first introduced in 2006, the year of his death, it was not enacted at that time. After being revised and reintroduced in 2009, the new version of the Zadroga Act was passed by the House of Representatives in September 2010. Next it went to the Senate, where a Republican filibuster left its fate uncertain. Some heavy lobbying — including by former Daily Show host Jon Stewart, who devoted an entire episode of his show to the subject — shamed legislators into supporting a bill that most citizens feel should have been supported without reservation.
On the front lines of treating those whose health has been affected by exposure to the air in lower Manhattan is the aforementioned World Trade Center Health Program, which is administered by the CDC and which was established as part of the Zadroga Act.
There have been still other efforts to help the victims through the years. The The September 11 Victim Compensation Fund, for example, helps first responders who are too sick to work and their families. The fund was set up in 2001 to provide compensation for anyone who suffered physical harm or was killed at Ground Zero (or their personal representative in the case of the latter) from the “terrorist-related aircraft crashes of September 11, 2001” or “from the debris removal efforts that took place in the immediate aftermath of those crashes.” It was extended another five years at the same time as the Zadroga bill was passed. In 2015, the deadline for the filing of claims was again extended — this time until December 18, 2020.
CNN reported on the victim compensation fund in August 2016:
“The entire World Trade Center Health Program has approximately 75,000 members to date. In addition to those with 9/11-linked cancer diagnoses, more than 12,000 have been diagnosed with 9/11-related mental health issues. More 32,000 have been diagnosed with aero-digestive issues, such as asthma, chronic cough, gastroesophageal reflux disorder or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, connected to the attacks.”
New research by the World Trade Center Health Registry (which was created in 2002 by the New York City Department of Health and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry), published in 2016 in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, found that those with 9/11-related chronic health conditions were more likely to experience early retirement or job loss. It also found that all types of cancers were occurring at higher than normal rates among rescue and recovery workers as well as civilian survivors.
There are many bad days ahead as more and more die or become ill. Those who gave unselfishly of their labor and their time to help with rescue and recovery efforts at the World Trade Center site — or people who simply lived or worked close by — are not only getting sick in growing numbers but they have had to fight for years to have their health struggles recognized and addressed by the very government that told them the air at Ground Zero was safe to breathe.
According to the research, those in the WTCHR program who were in the World Trade Center towers at the time of the event were 30 percent more likely to have PTSD and 50 percent more likely to be frequent binge drinkers 10 years after 9/11. Even workers involved in World Trade Center recovery at the Fresh Kills Landfill and on barges had an increased risk of new-onset asthma, and they further illustrate why the mission of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth remains so vital.
Those who suffer from cancer and other illnesses as a result of 9/11 are the victims of a deliberate decision to demolish the buildings, which turned the towers into the toxic dust that invaded their bodies. For them, 9/11 isn’t an event that happened more than 15 years ago. For them, it’s still happening, still killing. The dual need to educate the public about what destroyed the three towers and to obtain a new investigation is as relevant and essential today as it was in the years immediately following 9/11.
The truth about what these people were exposed to and what it did to them physically was hidden and denied for years. Just as the truth about how the three World Trade Center towers really came down has been hidden and denied. The consequences of both lies have been catastrophic.
But whether it happens gradually or suddenly, truth has a way of breaking through if enough people take a stand. I’m reminded of singer/songwriter Paul Simon being invited to perform at the 10th anniversary ceremony for 9/11 in 2011, a ceremony that first responders had been excluded from attending. He was expected to sing Bridge Over Troubled Water, which would seem to be a safe and appropriate song for the occasion. But instead, he gave us a haunting version of another classic, which begins, “Hello darkness, my old friend.” Simon had decided that the most appropriate statement for this occasion would come from The Sound of Silence.
Fools, said I, you do not know
Silence like a cancer grows…
Perhaps Simon decided that silence had already claimed enough victims.
9/11 Destroyed America. Paul Craig Roberts. Apr. 24, 2017.
The events on September 11, 2001, changed the world. It was the excuse for the US government to launch military attacks on seven Middle Eastern countries, causing civilian casualties in the millions and sending waves of Muslim refugees into the Western world. The US government wasted trillions of dollars destroying countries and murdering women and children, while public infrastructure in the US deteriorated, Americans’ homes were foreclosed, and American health needs went unattended. 9/11 was also the excuse for the destruction of the protection that the US Constitution provided to ensure the liberty of the American citizen. Today no American has the protection of the civil liberty that the Constitution guarantees. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/04/20/freedom-democracy-tyranny/
On September 11, 2001, when a neighbor called and told me to turn on the TV, I stopped what I was doing and turned on the TV. What I saw was the two World Trade Center Towers blowing up. I had often enjoyed lunch in the rooftop restaurant in one of the towers across the street from my Wall Street Journal office.
A minuscule-by-comparison frail aluminum airliner hit one massive steel tower and then another aluminum airliner hit the other. There were some plumes of orange outside the buildings. Then approximately after one hour, less in one case, more in the other, the two towers exploded floor by floor as they fell into their own footprint.
This was precisely the way the news anchors described what I was seeing. “It looks exactly like a controlled demolition,” the news anchors reported. And indeed it did. As a Georgia Tech student I had witnessed a controlled demolition, and that is what I saw on television, just as that was what the news anchors saw.
Later that day Larry Silverstein who owned, or held the lease on, the World Trade Center, explained on TV that the free fall collapse in the late afternoon of the third WTC skyscraper, Building 7, into its own footprint was a conscious decision to “pull” the building. Pull is the term used by controlled demolition to describe a building wired with explosives to be destroyed. Building 7 had not been hit by an airliner, and suffered only minor and very limited office fires. Silverstein’s statement was afterwards corrected by authorities to mean that the firemen were pulled from the building. However, many videos show the firemen already out of the building with the fireman stating that the building was going to be brought down.
As there is no doubt whatsoever that Building 7 was wired for demolition, the question is why?
Because Americans are an insouciant and trusting people and confident of the inherent goodness of their country, years passed before even experts noticed that the official story stood in total contraction to known laws of physics, was in total contraction to how buildings collapse from asymmetrical damage, and could not have collapsed due to being hit by airliners as the buildings met all code requirements for withstanding airliner collusions. Many did not even know that the third skyscraper, Building 7, had collapsed.
Professor Steven E. Jones, a professor of physics at BYU, was among the first to see that the official story was pure fantasy. His reward for speaking out was to have his tenure contract bought out by BYU, many believe under orders from the federal government backed up with the threat that all federal support of science at BYU would be terminated unless Stephen Jones was.
Cynthia McKinney, a black woman who represented a Georgia congressional district in the US House of Representatives was either much brighter or much braver than her white colleagues. She raised obvious questions about 9/11, questions begging to be asked, and lost her seat.
Approximately five years after 9/11, San Francisco architect Richard Gage noticed that the three WTC buildings did not fall down in any way consistent with the official explanation. He formed Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, currently about 3,000 members. This group includes high rise architects and structural engineers who actually are experienced in the construction of skyscrapers. In other words, they are people who know what they are talking about.
These 3,000 experts have said that the official explanation of the collapse of three skyscrapers stands in contradiction to known laws of physics, architecture, and structural engineering
In other words, the official explanation is totally impossible. Only an uneducated and ignorant public can believe the official 9/11 story. The US population fits this description.
A&E for 9/11 Truth is gradually gaining assent from architects and engineers. It is very difficult for an architect or engineer to support the truth, because the American population, which includes patriotic construction companies, whose employees fly American flags on their trucks, don’t want to hire architects and engineers who are “enemies of America aligned with Arab terrorists.” In America, if you tell the truth, you are in great danger of losing your customers and even your life.
Think now about physicists. How many physics faculties do you know that are not dependent on federal grants, usually for military-related work? The same for chemistry. Any physics professor who challenged the official story of 9/11 with the obvious fact that the story contravenes known laws of physics would endanger not only his own career but the careers of his entire department.
Truth in America is extremely costly to express. It comes at a high cost that hardly any can afford.
Our masters know this, and thus they can dispense with truth at will. Moreover, any expert courageous enough to speak the truth is easily branded a “conspiracy theorist.”
Who comes to his defense? Not his colleagues. They want rid of him as quickly as possible. Truth is a threat to their careers. They can’t afford to be associated with truth. In America, truth is a career-killing word.
In America, truth is becoming a synonym for “Russian agent.” Only Russian Agents tell the truth, which must mean that truth is an enemy of America. Lists are being prepared of websites that speak truth to power and thus are seditious. In the United States today people can lie at will without consequence, but it is deadly to tell the truth.
Support A&E for 9/11 Truth. These are heroic people. 9/11 was the manufactured excuse for the neoconservatives’ 16 years of war crimes against millions of Muslims peoples, remnants of which now seek refuge in Europe.
Neoconservatives are a tiny number of people. No more than a dozen are of any consequence. Yet they have used America to murder millions. And now they are fomenting war with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. The world would never survive such a war.
Are Americans so insouciant that they will stand aside while a dozen neoconservatives destroy the world?
The Consequences of 9/11. Ian Welsh. Sept. 11, 2016.
On September 11, 2001, I was at work. As the reports came in, the company set up a TV in a large room and work ground to a halt as people watched.
I turned to a friend and said, “I hope America doesn’t attack the wrong country in retaliation.”
He scoffed.
Assuming that Osama bin Laden was behind 9/11, it was a master stroke. Osama was the first great man of the 21st century, the man who changed the course of history in precisely the way he planned. (Remember, “great” and “good” are not synonyms. Plenty of great men and women have been monsters.)
Osama was a smart man and had spent a lot of time considering the Muslim world’s situation.
He believed that the regimes he wanted to overthrow, like Egypt, survived due to the support of an enemy much further away: the US. His thesis was that US support propped up enemy societies.
The usual rule in Islam is to fight the local tyrant, but OBL argued that the US must be fought first: Only once it was defeated, or at least severely weakened, could Islam win the more local battles. He also wanted to prove that US soldiers could be defeated.
What he wanted to do was to draw US soldiers into a killing field. He figured it would be Afghanistan, and America did oblige and attack, but Afghanistan wasn’t much of a quagmire in those first years.
Then, the US decided to attack Iraq, one of OBL’s enemies, as Iraq was run by a secular regime. And Iraq turned out to be a complete mess.
The US walked all over the conventional army of Iraq, then was fought to a bloody loss by irregulars (and it was a loss–US troops had to pay bribes in order to leave the country without being fired upon).
And Islamic groups and revolution spread, and if the US wasn’t defeated, well, all the money, men, and attention spent on Iraq did contribute to the great financial crisis, and Muslims learned that they could beat the US if they were willing to take enough pain doing it.
Osama won. He got much of what he wanted. He must have praised Allah mightily for making his enemies attack Iraq.
As for the US, the “state of emergency” declared after 9/11 is still in effect. The Patriot Act is still in effect. The Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) is still in effect. These are the Enabling Acts of Bush’s republic–and of Obama’s.
US citizens did, in fact, lose many of their freedoms and a great deal of their prosperity as a result of 9/11.
9/11 was a milder form of the Reichstag Fire. No, Bush wasn’t Hitler, but he did change the nature of the US significantly–enough so that it is a recognizably different country than it was before.
Americans ratified those changes by re-electing Bush in 2004, knowing fully that he was torturing and so on. Then came Obama.
Obama is Bush’s heir. Anything one party does can be undone by the next, but Obama chose to roll back very little of Bush’s republic, and in fact, he extended many of Bush’s policies. He is worse on whistleblowers than Bush (far, far worse). He has performed far more drone assassinations. He has deported far more immigrants. And he has kept all the enabling acts in place.
I make no claim that the US before 9/11 was “good,” but it was better than the US after 9/11, to the great harm of very many people all around the world–including Americans themselves.
But 9/11? 9/11 was a success. It got the man who planned it about three-quarters of what he wanted.
A very great success. Too bad the US handed that success to Osama. He couldn’t have made you do anything, he had to to take a gamble on you.
Osama understood the US well enough to get the US to do what he wanted. The US did not understand Osama well enough to avoid walking straight into his trap…or they had so much hubris they figured they could walk through it unharmed.
So many dead. So many maimed. So many refugees. So many economically destroyed. So many better roads not taken.
But Osama, Osama at least was happy with 9/11.
That was Bush, and the US’s greatest gift to Osama, which outweighs his death a 1000/1. Men like Osama are not scared of death.
So much stupid, so much evil. But Osama was just evil, not stupid.
What 9/11 Did To America And the World. Ian Welsh. Sept. 11, 2017.
I wasn’t going to write much more about 9/11, but then Obama wrote that no act of terror could ever change America.
I don’t know if that’s true. If it is, it means America was already a terrible terrible place.
The funny thing about 9/11 is that it worked. Bin Laden had a plan, his plan was to draw American in and show they could be beaten.
He thought they’d be beaten in Afghanistan. They weren’t, then, they were beaten in Iraq. When America left Iraq it had to pay the various militias off so they wouldn’t attack it.
That’s losing.
Meanwhile there are al-Qaeda affiliates over much of Asia and Africa. Al-Qaeda central may be weaker, but al-Qaeda the idea is far far stronger than it was before 9/11.
Saddam was a secular Muslim. He was one of bin Laden’s enemies, and the US destroyed him.
Meanwhile, at home, America destroyed its freedoms. It tortured people.
America also instigated a world wide assassination program, killing whoever it wanted wherever it wanted on the authority of the President.
America had always been pretty shitty when dealing with others: supporting coups versus democratic governments, sponsoring death squads, looking the other way when its pet governments and terrorists raped and tortured and murdered. (Pinochet had dogs trained to rape women, he was very approved of by Washington.)
Clinton, of course, had killed about half a million Iraq children with his sanctions, and Albright, a truly evil woman who is burning in Hell today if there is one (I doubt it) thought it was “worth it”.
But after 9/11 America went even further. Torture, from the top, by its own soldiers, not winked at. Widespread assassination. The gutting of habeas corpus. Probably a million more dead Iraqis. Later, under Obama, the destruction of Libya, another war crime (he should hang, like Nazis hung, along with Blair, Cameron and Bush. Most Nazis were hung not for the Holocaust but for attacking a country which had not attacked them.)
American crimes, of course, are endless. All empires crimes are endless, and so are all colonial states’ crimes. This is true of America and Canada, as they moved West, and it is true today of Israel.
Still, something important changed after 9/11. Lines were crossed.
Americans who are ok with all the crimes should be aghast as well, not that lines were crossed (they have no lines) but that they were crossed so incompetently. America got its ass kicked by a bunch of rag tag militias. The myth of American military supremacy lay shattered. America can still bomb anyone into dust, but that its military can do anything but destroy, well, everyone knows that isn’t the case now.
Bin Laden was the first great man of the 21st century. Great is not a synonym for good. From a position of infinite weakness he made his enemy use its own strength to accomplish his goals.
America proved itself not just evil (don’t even, there are too many dead), but stunningly incompetent and crippled by corruption.
And today Democrats are rehabilitating George Bush, the war criminal, to attack Trump.
Trump may yet do far worse than Bush, but until he’s started a major war, he hasn’t, and even if he does, Bush was and is evil and should be in a war crimes dock, along with most other major American politicians of the time, almost all of whom voted to give Bush the vast powers he used exactly as any fool could predict he would.
9/11 either changed America, or revealed America. Either way, America after 9/11 was ghastly and evil.
And in 2004, knowing all the evil Bush had done, Americans re-elected him, thus showing that enough of them approved of what he had done. Cavil all you want about vote suppression and so on, it is not as if there was a huge tide of Americans who said “not in my name.”
This is still George Bush’s America; and his America is bin Laden’s America. Bin Laden was right about America. He knew exactly what America was, pushed its buttons and America did what bin Laden wanted to.
Bin Laden was a profoundly evil man, and he recognized the profound evil of America and used that evil to his benefit.
Understand clearly, there were choices. Iraq did not have to be invaded. Afghanistan did not have to be occupied (a punitive expedition would have been sufficient.) The Patriot Act did not have to be passed. Torture in Guantanmo did not have to occur; routine drone assassination was not necessary.
All of these were affirmative choices, and virtually all of them were reconfirmed in 2004, then in 2008, because Obama continued almost everything Bush did, and even ramped up some of it, like drone assassination and deportations.
Bin Laden won because he was right that America was evil, or perhaps, that with a push, it was willing to be even more evil.
Hell of a thing.
Dr. Graeme MacQueen is the former Director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University in Canada. He was an organizer of the Toronto Hearings on 9/11, is a member of the Consensus 9/11 Panel, and is a former co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies.
On November 23, 1963, the day after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Fidel Castro gave a talk on Cuban radio and television.[1] He pulled together, as well as he could in the amount of time available to him, the evidence he had gathered from news media and other sources, and he reflected on this evidence.
The questions he posed were well chosen: they could serve as a template for those confronting complex acts of political violence. Were there contradictions and absurdities in the story being promoted in the U.S. media? Who benefitted from the assassination? Were intelligence agencies claiming to know more than they could legitimately know? Was there evidence of foreknowledge of the murder? What was the main ideological clash in powerful U.S. circles and how did Kennedy fit in? Was there a faction that had the capacity and willingness to carry out such an act? And so on. But beneath the questions lay a central, unspoken fact: Castro was able to imagine—as a real possibility and not as mere fantasy—that the story being promoted by the U.S. government and media was radically false. He was able to conceive of the possibility that the killing had not been carried out by a lone gunman on the left sympathetic to Cuba and the Soviet Union, but by powerful, ultra-right forces, including forces internal to the state, in the United States. Because his conceptual framework did not exclude this hypothesis he was able to examine the evidence that favoured it. He was able to recognize the links between those wishing to overthrow the Cuban government and take more aggressive action toward the Soviet Union and those wishing to get Kennedy out of the way.
In the immediate wake of the assassination, and after the Warren Commission’s report appeared in 1964, few among the elite left leadership in the U.S. shared Castro’s imagination. Vincent Salandria, one of key researchers and dissidents, said: “I have experienced from the beginning that the left was most unreceptive to my conception of the assassination.”[2]
I.F. Stone, a pillar of the American left leadership, praised the Warren Commission and consigned critics who accused the Commission of a cover-up to “the booby hatch.”[3] The contrast with Castro is sharp. Speaking well before the Warren Commission’s emergence, Castro mocked the narrative it would later endorse. Several other prominent left intellectuals agreed with I. F. Stone, and declined to criticize the Warren Commission’s report.[4]
Noam Chomsky, resisting serious efforts to get him to look at the evidence, said at various times that he knew little about the affair, had little interest in it, did not regard it as important, and found the idea of a “high-level conspiracy with policy significance” to be “implausible to a quite extraordinary degree.”[5] He would later say almost exactly the same thing about the 9/11 attacks, finding the thesis that the U.S. administration was involved in the crime “close to inconceivable,”[6] and expressing his disinterest in the entire issue. [MW: as otherwise a fan of Chomsky, I simply don't get his perspective on either of these issues; Chomsky knows better than almost anyone how much evil the U.S. empire has perpetrated around the globe for decades, but he seems unwilling to allow himself to consider that the powers that be would go quite so far as pulling off 9/11 as an inside job. Extraordinary. We all have our blind spots and delusions.]
Not everyone on the American left accepted the FBI and Warren Commission reports uncritically. Dave Dellinger and Staughton Lynd, for example, encouraged dissident researchers.[7] In fact, several of the leading dissident investigators, such as Vincent Salandria, Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher, were themselves, at least by today’s standards, on the left of the political spectrum. But they were not among the elite left leadership in the country and they were, to a great extent, unsupported by that leadership during the most crucial period.
Chomsky’s use of the terms “implausible” and “inconceivable” has stimulated me to write the present article. I have no new evidence to bring to the debate, which is decades old now, as to how his mind and the other great minds of the U.S. left leadership could have failed to see what was obvious to so many. My approach will assume the good faith of these left leaders and will take as its point of departure Chomsky’s own words. I will explore the suggestion that these intellectuals were not able to conceive, were not able to imagine, that these attacks were operations engineered by intelligence agencies and the political right in the U.S.
Why would Castro have had less difficulty than the U.S. left leadership imagining that the assassination of Kennedy had been carried out by and for the American ultra-right and the intelligence community?
What we imagine to be true in the present will surely be influenced by what we have intimately experienced in the past. Castro’s imagination of what U.S. imperial powers might do was shaped by what he had witnessed them actually do, or attempt to do, to him and his country.
Castro referred in his November 23 talk not only to the economic warfare against Cuba, but to the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. But, of course, the CIA’s Operation Mongoose had been active in the interim between these two latter events, and he was familiar with its main lines. Perhaps he was not familiar with all its components. As far as I am aware, he did not know on November 23, 1963 of the 1962 Operation Northwoods plan, endorsed by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to create a pretext for an invasion of Cuba through a multi-faceted false flag operation that included terrorist attacks in Miami and Washington, to be falsely blamed on Cuba.[8] Had he been familiar with this scheme he might have cited it on November 23 to bolster his case.
Castro was certainly familiar with many plans and attempts to assassinate him, which were eventually confirmed to the U.S. public by the Church Committee’s report, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.”[9]But, to the best of my knowledge, he was not aware when he gave his November 23 talk of an assassination-planning meeting that had taken place the previous day. On November 22, the day Kennedy was killed, while Castro was meeting with an intermediary who conveyed Kennedy’s hope that Cuba and the United States would soon be able to work out a mode of peaceful coexistence,[10] members of the CIA were meeting with a Cuban to plot Castro’s death. The would-be assassin was not only given poison to use in an assassination attempt; he was also promised support by the CIA for a shooting, such as was taking place at that very time in Dallas. He was assured that “CIA would give him everything he needed (telescopic sight, silencer, all the money he wanted).”[11]
The Church committee used the term “ironic” to refer to the fact that the shooting of John Kennedy took place on the very day a Kennedy-Castro peace initiative was being countered by a CIA plan to kill Castro.[12] Why was there no discussion of the significance of the fact that the same people who were working for the overthrow of the Cuban government considered Kennedy and his peace initiatives serious obstacles to their plans?
Castro noted in his November 23 talk that Latin American rightwing forces might have been involved in the Kennedy killing. These forces, he said, had not only openly denounced Kennedy for his accommodation with Cuba but were pushing for an invasion of Cuba while simultaneously threatening a military coup in Brazil to prevent another Cuba. Castro could not know at the time what we now know, namely that the threatened coup in Brazil would indeed take place soon—on April 1, 1964. It would lead to a wave of authoritarianism and torture that would spread throughout Latin America.
If, therefore, we try to make the case that Castro’s critique of the mainstream account of Kennedy’s assassination was the result of paranoia, denial, and a delusional tendency to see conspiracies everywhere, we will have a hard row to hoe. Almost all the operations he mentioned in his talk, and several operations he did not mention, did involve conspiracies. Cuba was at the center of a set of actual and interconnected conspiracies.
I am not suggesting that because Castro imagined a particular scenario—ultra-right forces killing John Kennedy—it must have been true. That is not the point. The point is that only when our imagination embraces a hypothesis as possible will we seriously study that hypothesis and put it to the test.
The evidence accumulated over many years has shown, in my view, that Castro’s view of who killed John Kennedy was correct. In fact, I think the evidence presented by the first wave of researchers fifty years ago settled the matter.[13] However, it is not my intention to try to prove this in the present article. My topic is the left imagination.
The silencing, by an elite American left, of both dissident researchers and those who have been targets of Western imperial power has reached an unprecedented level in the interpretation of the events of September 11, 2001. The inability of the Western left leadership to imagine that these events were fraudulent—that they involved, as Fidel Castro put it in 1963, people “playing a very strange role in a very strange play”—has blocked understanding not of only of 9/11 but of actual, existing imperialism and its formation and deformation of world politics.
9/11 and state officials facing imperial power
Certainly, Furtado’s imagination had a wider scope than Maxwell’s. Could his personal experience have had something to do with this? Furtado was more than an “eminent economist;” he was an extremely distinguished intellectual who had held the position of Minister of Planning in the Goulart government when it was overthrown in the April 1, 1964 coup in Brazil. Furtado said in a 2003 interview:
Furtado has not been the only sceptical voice on the Latin American left. On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, himself a major target of U.S. imperial force, entered the public debate. The Associated Press reported on September 12, 2006:
The culmination of this Venezuelan scepticism was a statement in a legislative resolution of the country’s National Assembly. The resolution, apparently passed unanimously in the fall of 2006, referred to the 9/11 attacks as “self-inflicted.”[19]
In a sneering attack on the Chavez government in the Miami Herald, journalist Phil Gunson felt no need to support, with evidence or reason, his claim that Chavez was merely engaging in “anti-imperialist rhetoric.”[20] Presumably he knew the imaginations of Floridians could be trusted to block out the possibility that the insane rhetoric about 9/11 might have some truth to it.
One year later, on the sixth anniversary of the attacks, Fidel Castro, at that point ill and retired from government but still keeping up with political events, made his own conclusions known. “That painful incident,” he said, “occurred six years ago today.” “Today,” he said, “we know that the public was deliberately misinformed.” Castro listed several anomalies and omissions in the official reports. For example, he said: “The calculations with respect to the steel structures, plane impacts, the black boxes recovered and what they revealed do not coincide with the opinions of mathematicians, seismologists…demolition experts and others.”
Referring to the attacks generally, and the attack on the Pentagon specifically, Castro said: “We were deceived, as were the rest of the planet’s inhabitants.”[21]
This was a poignant admission by the man who had grasped the falsity of the Lee Harvey Oswald story one day after Kennedy’s assassination.
Reporting on Castro’s remarks in the Guardian, journalist Mark Tran said: “Fidel Castro today joined the band of September 11 conspiracy theorists by accusing the US of spreading disinformation about the attacks that took place six years ago.”[22]
Tran seems to have worried that the dismissive “conspiracy theorist” term might not put an end to the matter for readers of the Guardian, so he added two brief factual claims, one having to do with DNA evidence at the Pentagon and one having to do with a 2007 video allegedly showing Bin Laden giving an address.
The contempt for Castro’s intelligence, however, was breathtaking. Tran implied that his “facts,” which could have been found in about fifteen minutes on the Internet and which were subsequently questioned even by typically uncritical mainstream journalists, were beyond the research capabilities of the former President of Cuba.[23]
Indeed, much of the Western left leadership and associated media not only trusted the FBI[24]while ignoring Furtado, Chavez, the Venezuelan National Assembly and Fidel Castro; they also, through silence and ridicule, worked to prevent serious public discussion of the 9/11 controversy.
Among the U.S. left media that kept the silence, partially or wholly, are:
In the end, the most dramatic public challenge to the official account of 9/11 by a state leader did not come from the left. It came from a conservative leader who was, however, a target of U.S. imperial power. Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, 2010, President Ahmadinejad of Iran outlined three possible hypotheses for the 9/11 attacks.[25] The first was the U.S. government’s hypothesis—”a very powerful and complex terrorist group, able to successfully cross all layers of the American intelligence and security, carried out the attack.” The second was the hypothesis that “some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime.” The third was a somewhat weaker version of the second, namely that the assault “was carried out by a terrorist group but the American government supported and took advantage of the situation.”
Ahmadinejad implied, though he did not definitively claim, that he favoured the second hypothesis. He went on to suggest that even if waging war were an appropriate response to a terrorist attack—he did not think it was—a thorough and independent investigation should have preceded the assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq in which hundreds of thousands of people died.
He ended his discussion of 9/11 with a proposal that the UN set up an independent fact-finding group to look into the 9/11 events.
In reporting on this event, The New York Times noted that Ahmadinejad’s comments “prompted at least 33 delegations to walk out, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Costa Rica, all 27 members of the European Union and the union’s representative.”[26]
The Times’ report was given to remarks that sidestepped the Iranian president’s assertions. Ahmadinejad’s remarks were made to endear himself to the world’s Muslim community, and especially to the Arab world. Ahmadinejad was playing the politician in Iran, where he had to contend with conservatives trying to “outflank him.” Ahmadinejad wanted to keep himself “at the center of global attention while deflecting attention away from his dismal domestic record.” Ahmadinejad “obviously delights in being provocative” and “seemed to go out of his way to sabotage any comments he made previously this week about Iran’s readiness for dialogue with the United States.”
The possibility that Ahmadinejad might have been sincere, or that there may have been an evidential basis for his views, was not mentioned.
Meanwhile, the reported response to Ahmadinejad’s talk by the United States Mission to the United Nations was harsh:
And what did the U.S. Mission mean when it said that Ahmadinejad did not represent the views of Iranians? His views on 9/11 were probably much closer to the views of Iranians than were the views of the U.S. Mission. As will be explained later, the great majority of the world’s Muslims reject the official account of 9/11.
In his address to the General Assembly the following year, Ahmadinejad briefly revisited this issue, saying that, after his 2010 proposal of an investigation into 9/11, Iran was put “under pressure and threat by the government of the United States.” Moreover, he said, instead of supporting a fact-finding team, the U.S. killed the alleged perpetrator of the attacks (Osama bin Laden) without bringing him to trial.[27]
In 2012 another leader in the Muslim world made his position on 9/11 known. Dr. Mahathir Mohamad had been Prime Minister of Malaysia from 1981 to 2003 and was still in 2012 a significant power in his country and a major figure in the global south. By then he had spent considerable time discussing 9/11 with several well-known members of the U.S. movement of dissent (including William Rodriguez and David Ray Griffin)[28] and had indicated that he questioned the official account. But on November 19, 2012 he left no doubt about his position. In a 20-minute public address introducing a day-long international conference on 9/11 in Kuala Lumpur, he noted:
Now, of course, it is possible that these current and former state officials had not seriously studied 9/11 and were simply intoxicated by anti-imperial fervour. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Those who visited Venezuela well before the public pronouncements in that country in September of 2006 noted that officials had collected books and other materials on the subject of 9/11.[30] And Malaysia’s Mahathir had been meeting people to discuss the issue for years. There is no reason to doubt what he said in his 2012 talk: “I have thought a lot about 9/11.” The dismissal of these leaders by the Western left is puzzling, to say the least.
Educator Paulo Freire, himself a victim of the 1964 coup in Brazil, pointed out years ago that when members of an oppressor class join oppressed people in their struggle for justice they may, despite the best of intentions, bring prejudices with them, “which include a lack of confidence in the people’s ability to think…and to know.”[31] Is it possible that the left leadership in the U.S. has fallen into this trap?
The dismissal of 9/11 sceptics has been carried out through a silence punctuated by occasional outbursts. The late Alexander Cockburn of Counterpunch was given to outbursts. Not content to speak of the “fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracists” and to tie them to the decline of the American left, Cockburn even took the opportunity to go beyond 9/11 and pledge allegiance once more, as he had in previous years, to the Warren Commission’s Lee Harvey Oswald hypothesis[32]—a hypothesis that had, in my opinion, been shown to be absurd half a century ago.
In a January 2017 article entitled, “American Psychosis,” Chris Hedges continued the anti-dissent campaign. Crying out that, “We feel trapped in a hall of mirrors,” Hedges announced that:
And thus the U.S. left leadership sits in the left chamber of the hall of mirrors, complaining about conspiracy theories while closing its eyes to actual conspiracies crucial to contemporary imperialism.
9/11 and public opinion
If state leaders familiar with Western imperial power have questioned the official narrative of the September 11, 2001 attacks, what about “the people” beloved of the left?
Actually, sorting out what portion of the world’s population qualifies, according to ideological criteria, as “the people” is a difficult task—an almost metaphysical exercise. So let us ask an easier question: what, according to surveys undertaken, appears to be the level of belief and unbelief in the world with respect to the 9/11 narrative?
There have been many polls. Comparing and compiling the results is very difficult since the same questions are seldom asked, in precisely the same words, in different polls. It is, however, possible to set forth grounded estimates.
In 2008, WorldPublicOpinion.org polled over 16,000 people in 17 countries. Of the total population of 2.5 billion people represented in the survey, only 39% said they thought that Al-Qaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks.[35]
The belief that Al-Qaeda carried out the attacks is, I suggest, an essential component of belief in the official narrative of 9/11. If only 39% is willing to name Al-Qaeda as responsible, then a maximum of 39% can be counted as believers of the official narrative.
This WorldPublicOpinion.org poll is, for the most part, supported by other polls, suggesting that the U.S. official narrative is, globally, a minority view. If these figures are correct, of the current world population of 7.5 billion, roughly 2.9 billion people affirm the official view of 9/11 and 4.6 billion do not affirm it.
Now, of the 61% who do not affirm the official view of 9/11, a large percentage says it does not know who carried out the attacks (by implication, it does not know what the goals of the attackers were, and so on). But the number of those who think the U.S. government was behind the attacks is by no means trivial. The figure appears to be about 14% of the world’s population.[36] If this is correct, roughly 1 billion people think the U.S. government was behind the attacks. Of course, this figure includes children. But even when we exclude everyone under 18 years of age we have 700 million adults in the world who think the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks.
It is not clear if the Guardian’s “band of September 11 conspiracy theorists,” which Castro was said to have joined, consists of this 700 million people or if it consists of the entire group of 4.6 billion non-believers. Either way, we are talking about a pretty large “band.”
Do these poll results prove that the official narrative is false? No. Do they prove that blaming elements of the U.S. government is correct? No. But these figures suggest two things. First, the official story, despite its widespread dissemination, has failed to capture the imaginations of the majority of people on the planet. Second, the minds of 700 million adults have no trouble embracing the possibility that elements of the U.S. government were behind the attacks.
What can be said about the views of that segment of the world population that is most clearly targeted by Western imperialism today?
The so-called Global War on Terror, announced shortly after the 9/11 events, has mainly targeted countries with Muslim majorities.
The 2008 WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of people in 17 countries included five countries with majority Muslim populations. Of the total Muslim population represented in the survey (399.6 million people in 2008), only 21.2% assigned guilt to Al-Qaeda.[37]
In 2011 the Pew Research Group surveyed eight Muslim populations. Of the total Muslim population represented (588.2 million in 2011), only 17% assigned guilt to Arabs.[38]
The evidence suggests that scepticism toward the official account among Muslims has been growing. In December of 2016 a published poll of British Muslims indicated that only 4% of those polled believed that “Al-Qaeda/Muslim terrorists” were responsible for 9/11, whereas 31% held the American government responsible.[39] This is remarkable given the unvarying, repetitive telling of the official story by British mainstream media and political parties.
Are British Muslims wallowing in feelings of victimhood, which have made them prey to extremists peddling “conspiracy theories?” As a matter of fact, the British think tank that sponsored the 2016 poll has drawn this conclusion. But the think tank in question, Policy Exchange, has a special relationship to the UK’s Conservative Party and appears to have carried out the poll precisely in order to put British Muslims under increased scrutiny and suspicion.[40]
Cannot the left, in its interpretation of the views of this targeted population, do better?
Most peculiar and disturbing is the tendency of left activists and leaders to join with state intelligence agencies in using the term “conspiracy theory” to dismiss those who raise questions about official state narratives.
There seems to be little awareness among these left critics of the history of the term.[41] They seem not to realize that they are employing a propaganda expression, the function of which is to discourage people from looking beneath the surface of political events, especially political events in which elements of their own government might have played a hidden and unsavoury role.
In the case of the 9/11 attacks it is important to remember, when the “conspiracy theory” accusation is made, that the lone wolf alternative, which was available for the John Kennedy assassination, is not available here. Everyone agrees that the attack was the result of multiple persons planning in secret to commit a crime. That is, the attack was the result of a conspiracy. The question is not, Was there a conspiracy? The question is, Who were the conspirators? Defamation cannot answer this question.
Conclusion
Suppose our imaginations can embrace the possibility that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by elements in the U.S. government. In that case what do we do next? There is no mystery. Once the imagination stops filtering out a hypothesis and allows it into the realm of the possible, it can be put to the test. Evidence and reason must now do the job.[42] Imagination cannot settle the question of truth or falsity any more than ideology, morality, or “common sense.”
I am not concerned in this article to demonstrate the truth of the “inside job” hypothesis of the 9/11 attacks. Ten years of research have led me to conclude that it is correct, but in the present paper I am concerned only with the preliminary, but vital, issue of imagination. Those who cannot imagine this hypothesis to be true will leave it unexamined, and, in the worst of worlds, will contribute to the silencing of dissenters. The left, in this case, will betray the best of its tradition and abandon both the targets of imperial oppression and their spokespeople.
Fidel Castro sounded the warning in his November 23, 1963 speech:
9/11 Ten Years Later: When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed. by David Ray Griffin
The funny thing about 9/11 is that it worked. Bin Laden had a plan, his plan was to draw American in and show they could be beaten.
He thought they’d be beaten in Afghanistan. They weren’t, then, they were beaten in Iraq. When America left Iraq it had to pay the various militias off so they wouldn’t attack it.
That’s losing.
Meanwhile there are al-Qaeda affiliates over much of Asia and Africa. Al-Qaeda central may be weaker, but al-Qaeda the idea is far far stronger than it was before 9/11.
Saddam was a secular Muslim. He was one of bin Laden’s enemies, and the US destroyed him.
Meanwhile, at home, America destroyed its freedoms. It tortured people.
America also instigated a world wide assassination program, killing whoever it wanted wherever it wanted on the authority of the President.
America had always been pretty shitty when dealing with others: supporting coups versus democratic governments, sponsoring death squads, looking the other way when its pet governments and terrorists raped and tortured and murdered. (Pinochet had dogs trained to rape women, he was very approved of by Washington.)
Clinton, of course, had killed about half a million Iraq children with his sanctions, and Albright, a truly evil woman who is burning in Hell today if there is one (I doubt it) thought it was “worth it”.
But after 9/11 America went even further. Torture, from the top, by its own soldiers, not winked at. Widespread assassination. The gutting of habeas corpus. Probably a million more dead Iraqis. Later, under Obama, the destruction of Libya, another war crime (he should hang, like Nazis hung, along with Blair, Cameron and Bush. Most Nazis were hung not for the Holocaust but for attacking a country which had not attacked them.)
American crimes, of course, are endless. All empires crimes are endless, and so are all colonial states’ crimes. This is true of America and Canada, as they moved West, and it is true today of Israel.
Still, something important changed after 9/11. Lines were crossed.
Americans who are ok with all the crimes should be aghast as well, not that lines were crossed (they have no lines) but that they were crossed so incompetently. America got its ass kicked by a bunch of rag tag militias. The myth of American military supremacy lay shattered. America can still bomb anyone into dust, but that its military can do anything but destroy, well, everyone knows that isn’t the case now.
Bin Laden was the first great man of the 21st century. Great is not a synonym for good. From a position of infinite weakness he made his enemy use its own strength to accomplish his goals.
America proved itself not just evil (don’t even, there are too many dead), but stunningly incompetent and crippled by corruption.
And today Democrats are rehabilitating George Bush, the war criminal, to attack Trump.
Trump may yet do far worse than Bush, but until he’s started a major war, he hasn’t, and even if he does, Bush was and is evil and should be in a war crimes dock, along with most other major American politicians of the time, almost all of whom voted to give Bush the vast powers he used exactly as any fool could predict he would.
9/11 either changed America, or revealed America. Either way, America after 9/11 was ghastly and evil.
And in 2004, knowing all the evil Bush had done, Americans re-elected him, thus showing that enough of them approved of what he had done. Cavil all you want about vote suppression and so on, it is not as if there was a huge tide of Americans who said “not in my name.”
This is still George Bush’s America; and his America is bin Laden’s America. Bin Laden was right about America. He knew exactly what America was, pushed its buttons and America did what bin Laden wanted to.
Bin Laden was a profoundly evil man, and he recognized the profound evil of America and used that evil to his benefit.
Understand clearly, there were choices. Iraq did not have to be invaded. Afghanistan did not have to be occupied (a punitive expedition would have been sufficient.) The Patriot Act did not have to be passed. Torture in Guantanmo did not have to occur; routine drone assassination was not necessary.
All of these were affirmative choices, and virtually all of them were reconfirmed in 2004, then in 2008, because Obama continued almost everything Bush did, and even ramped up some of it, like drone assassination and deportations.
Bin Laden won because he was right that America was evil, or perhaps, that with a push, it was willing to be even more evil.
Hell of a thing.
Beyond their wildest dreams: 9/11 and the American Left. Dr Graeme MacQueen, Truth and Shadows. March 13, 2017
Dr. Graeme MacQueen is the former Director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University in Canada. He was an organizer of the Toronto Hearings on 9/11, is a member of the Consensus 9/11 Panel, and is a former co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies.
On November 23, 1963, the day after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Fidel Castro gave a talk on Cuban radio and television.[1] He pulled together, as well as he could in the amount of time available to him, the evidence he had gathered from news media and other sources, and he reflected on this evidence.
The questions he posed were well chosen: they could serve as a template for those confronting complex acts of political violence. Were there contradictions and absurdities in the story being promoted in the U.S. media? Who benefitted from the assassination? Were intelligence agencies claiming to know more than they could legitimately know? Was there evidence of foreknowledge of the murder? What was the main ideological clash in powerful U.S. circles and how did Kennedy fit in? Was there a faction that had the capacity and willingness to carry out such an act? And so on. But beneath the questions lay a central, unspoken fact: Castro was able to imagine—as a real possibility and not as mere fantasy—that the story being promoted by the U.S. government and media was radically false. He was able to conceive of the possibility that the killing had not been carried out by a lone gunman on the left sympathetic to Cuba and the Soviet Union, but by powerful, ultra-right forces, including forces internal to the state, in the United States. Because his conceptual framework did not exclude this hypothesis he was able to examine the evidence that favoured it. He was able to recognize the links between those wishing to overthrow the Cuban government and take more aggressive action toward the Soviet Union and those wishing to get Kennedy out of the way.
In the immediate wake of the assassination, and after the Warren Commission’s report appeared in 1964, few among the elite left leadership in the U.S. shared Castro’s imagination. Vincent Salandria, one of key researchers and dissidents, said: “I have experienced from the beginning that the left was most unreceptive to my conception of the assassination.”[2]
I.F. Stone, a pillar of the American left leadership, praised the Warren Commission and consigned critics who accused the Commission of a cover-up to “the booby hatch.”[3] The contrast with Castro is sharp. Speaking well before the Warren Commission’s emergence, Castro mocked the narrative it would later endorse. Several other prominent left intellectuals agreed with I. F. Stone, and declined to criticize the Warren Commission’s report.[4]
Noam Chomsky, resisting serious efforts to get him to look at the evidence, said at various times that he knew little about the affair, had little interest in it, did not regard it as important, and found the idea of a “high-level conspiracy with policy significance” to be “implausible to a quite extraordinary degree.”[5] He would later say almost exactly the same thing about the 9/11 attacks, finding the thesis that the U.S. administration was involved in the crime “close to inconceivable,”[6] and expressing his disinterest in the entire issue. [MW: as otherwise a fan of Chomsky, I simply don't get his perspective on either of these issues; Chomsky knows better than almost anyone how much evil the U.S. empire has perpetrated around the globe for decades, but he seems unwilling to allow himself to consider that the powers that be would go quite so far as pulling off 9/11 as an inside job. Extraordinary. We all have our blind spots and delusions.]
Not everyone on the American left accepted the FBI and Warren Commission reports uncritically. Dave Dellinger and Staughton Lynd, for example, encouraged dissident researchers.[7] In fact, several of the leading dissident investigators, such as Vincent Salandria, Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher, were themselves, at least by today’s standards, on the left of the political spectrum. But they were not among the elite left leadership in the country and they were, to a great extent, unsupported by that leadership during the most crucial period.
Chomsky’s use of the terms “implausible” and “inconceivable” has stimulated me to write the present article. I have no new evidence to bring to the debate, which is decades old now, as to how his mind and the other great minds of the U.S. left leadership could have failed to see what was obvious to so many. My approach will assume the good faith of these left leaders and will take as its point of departure Chomsky’s own words. I will explore the suggestion that these intellectuals were not able to conceive, were not able to imagine, that these attacks were operations engineered by intelligence agencies and the political right in the U.S.
Why would Castro have had less difficulty than the U.S. left leadership imagining that the assassination of Kennedy had been carried out by and for the American ultra-right and the intelligence community?
What we imagine to be true in the present will surely be influenced by what we have intimately experienced in the past. Castro’s imagination of what U.S. imperial powers might do was shaped by what he had witnessed them actually do, or attempt to do, to him and his country.
Castro referred in his November 23 talk not only to the economic warfare against Cuba, but to the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. But, of course, the CIA’s Operation Mongoose had been active in the interim between these two latter events, and he was familiar with its main lines. Perhaps he was not familiar with all its components. As far as I am aware, he did not know on November 23, 1963 of the 1962 Operation Northwoods plan, endorsed by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to create a pretext for an invasion of Cuba through a multi-faceted false flag operation that included terrorist attacks in Miami and Washington, to be falsely blamed on Cuba.[8] Had he been familiar with this scheme he might have cited it on November 23 to bolster his case.
Castro was certainly familiar with many plans and attempts to assassinate him, which were eventually confirmed to the U.S. public by the Church Committee’s report, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.”[9]But, to the best of my knowledge, he was not aware when he gave his November 23 talk of an assassination-planning meeting that had taken place the previous day. On November 22, the day Kennedy was killed, while Castro was meeting with an intermediary who conveyed Kennedy’s hope that Cuba and the United States would soon be able to work out a mode of peaceful coexistence,[10] members of the CIA were meeting with a Cuban to plot Castro’s death. The would-be assassin was not only given poison to use in an assassination attempt; he was also promised support by the CIA for a shooting, such as was taking place at that very time in Dallas. He was assured that “CIA would give him everything he needed (telescopic sight, silencer, all the money he wanted).”[11]
The Church committee used the term “ironic” to refer to the fact that the shooting of John Kennedy took place on the very day a Kennedy-Castro peace initiative was being countered by a CIA plan to kill Castro.[12] Why was there no discussion of the significance of the fact that the same people who were working for the overthrow of the Cuban government considered Kennedy and his peace initiatives serious obstacles to their plans?
Castro noted in his November 23 talk that Latin American rightwing forces might have been involved in the Kennedy killing. These forces, he said, had not only openly denounced Kennedy for his accommodation with Cuba but were pushing for an invasion of Cuba while simultaneously threatening a military coup in Brazil to prevent another Cuba. Castro could not know at the time what we now know, namely that the threatened coup in Brazil would indeed take place soon—on April 1, 1964. It would lead to a wave of authoritarianism and torture that would spread throughout Latin America.
If, therefore, we try to make the case that Castro’s critique of the mainstream account of Kennedy’s assassination was the result of paranoia, denial, and a delusional tendency to see conspiracies everywhere, we will have a hard row to hoe. Almost all the operations he mentioned in his talk, and several operations he did not mention, did involve conspiracies. Cuba was at the center of a set of actual and interconnected conspiracies.
I am not suggesting that because Castro imagined a particular scenario—ultra-right forces killing John Kennedy—it must have been true. That is not the point. The point is that only when our imagination embraces a hypothesis as possible will we seriously study that hypothesis and put it to the test.
The evidence accumulated over many years has shown, in my view, that Castro’s view of who killed John Kennedy was correct. In fact, I think the evidence presented by the first wave of researchers fifty years ago settled the matter.[13] However, it is not my intention to try to prove this in the present article. My topic is the left imagination.
The silencing, by an elite American left, of both dissident researchers and those who have been targets of Western imperial power has reached an unprecedented level in the interpretation of the events of September 11, 2001. The inability of the Western left leadership to imagine that these events were fraudulent—that they involved, as Fidel Castro put it in 1963, people “playing a very strange role in a very strange play”—has blocked understanding not of only of 9/11 but of actual, existing imperialism and its formation and deformation of world politics.
9/11 and state officials facing imperial power
Talk about blaming the victim. Three days after 9/11 the eminent economist Celso Furtado suggested in one of Brazil’s most influential newspapers that there were two explanations for the attack. One possibility, Furtado implied, was that this savage assault on America was the work of foreign terrorists, as the Americans suspected. But a more plausible explanation, he asserted, was that this disaster was a provocation carried out by the American far right to justify a takeover. He compared the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon to the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 and the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany.[14]Kenneth Maxwell wrote this paragraph in 2002. At the time he was the Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. The paragraph is from an article written for the Council entitled, “Anti-Americanism in Brazil.” In writing his article Maxwell clearly felt no need to give evidence or argument as he dismissed Furtado. He must have felt his readers would agree that the absurdity of Furtado’s remarks was self-evident. Furtado’s claim would be off their radar, beyond their imagination.
Certainly, Furtado’s imagination had a wider scope than Maxwell’s. Could his personal experience have had something to do with this? Furtado was more than an “eminent economist;” he was an extremely distinguished intellectual who had held the position of Minister of Planning in the Goulart government when it was overthrown in the April 1, 1964 coup in Brazil. Furtado said in a 2003 interview:
The United States was afraid of the direction we had been taking; this phase ended and we entered—as someone put it—the peace of the cemeteries, it was the era of the dictatorship. Thirty years went by without real thinking, without being able to participate in movements, with the most provocative and courageous young people being hunted down.[15]Did Celso Furtado have a wild imagination when he implied there was U.S. support for the coup? Not at all. The coup was not only hoped for, but prepared for and offered support at the highest level in the U.S. [16]
Furtado has not been the only sceptical voice on the Latin American left. On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, himself a major target of U.S. imperial force, entered the public debate. The Associated Press reported on September 12, 2006:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Tuesday that it’s plausible that the U.S. government was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Chavez did not specifically accuse the U.S. government of having a hand in the Sept. 11 attacks, but rather suggested that theories of U.S. involvement bear examination.
The Venezuelan leader, an outspoken critic of U.S. President George W. Bush, was reacting to a television report investigating a theory the Twin Towers were brought down with explosives after hijacked airplanes crashed into them in 2001.
“The hypothesis is not absurd … that those towers could have been dynamited,” Chavez said in a speech to supporters. “A building never collapses like that, unless it’s with an implosion.”
“The hypothesis that is gaining strength … is that it was the same U.S. imperial power that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist attack or act against its own people and against citizens of all over the world,” Chavez said. “Why? To justify the aggressions that immediately were unleashed on Afghanistan, on Iraq.”[17]Actually, scepticism in Venezuela about the 9/11 attacks was not new. In March of 2006, for example, well known survivor and eyewitness of the September 11, 2001 attacks, William Rodriguez, had spent time with high-ranking Venezuelan officials, including Chavez, and had given talks on television and in universities in that country.[18]
The culmination of this Venezuelan scepticism was a statement in a legislative resolution of the country’s National Assembly. The resolution, apparently passed unanimously in the fall of 2006, referred to the 9/11 attacks as “self-inflicted.”[19]
In a sneering attack on the Chavez government in the Miami Herald, journalist Phil Gunson felt no need to support, with evidence or reason, his claim that Chavez was merely engaging in “anti-imperialist rhetoric.”[20] Presumably he knew the imaginations of Floridians could be trusted to block out the possibility that the insane rhetoric about 9/11 might have some truth to it.
One year later, on the sixth anniversary of the attacks, Fidel Castro, at that point ill and retired from government but still keeping up with political events, made his own conclusions known. “That painful incident,” he said, “occurred six years ago today.” “Today,” he said, “we know that the public was deliberately misinformed.” Castro listed several anomalies and omissions in the official reports. For example, he said: “The calculations with respect to the steel structures, plane impacts, the black boxes recovered and what they revealed do not coincide with the opinions of mathematicians, seismologists…demolition experts and others.”
Referring to the attacks generally, and the attack on the Pentagon specifically, Castro said: “We were deceived, as were the rest of the planet’s inhabitants.”[21]
This was a poignant admission by the man who had grasped the falsity of the Lee Harvey Oswald story one day after Kennedy’s assassination.
Reporting on Castro’s remarks in the Guardian, journalist Mark Tran said: “Fidel Castro today joined the band of September 11 conspiracy theorists by accusing the US of spreading disinformation about the attacks that took place six years ago.”[22]
Tran seems to have worried that the dismissive “conspiracy theorist” term might not put an end to the matter for readers of the Guardian, so he added two brief factual claims, one having to do with DNA evidence at the Pentagon and one having to do with a 2007 video allegedly showing Bin Laden giving an address.
The contempt for Castro’s intelligence, however, was breathtaking. Tran implied that his “facts,” which could have been found in about fifteen minutes on the Internet and which were subsequently questioned even by typically uncritical mainstream journalists, were beyond the research capabilities of the former President of Cuba.[23]
Indeed, much of the Western left leadership and associated media not only trusted the FBI[24]while ignoring Furtado, Chavez, the Venezuelan National Assembly and Fidel Castro; they also, through silence and ridicule, worked to prevent serious public discussion of the 9/11 controversy.
Among the U.S. left media that kept the silence, partially or wholly, are:
- Monthly Review
- Common Dreams
- Huffington Post
- Counterpunch
- The Nation
- The Real News
- Democracy Now!
- Z Magazine
- The Progressive
- Mother Jones
- Alternet.org
- MoveOn.org
In the end, the most dramatic public challenge to the official account of 9/11 by a state leader did not come from the left. It came from a conservative leader who was, however, a target of U.S. imperial power. Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, 2010, President Ahmadinejad of Iran outlined three possible hypotheses for the 9/11 attacks.[25] The first was the U.S. government’s hypothesis—”a very powerful and complex terrorist group, able to successfully cross all layers of the American intelligence and security, carried out the attack.” The second was the hypothesis that “some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime.” The third was a somewhat weaker version of the second, namely that the assault “was carried out by a terrorist group but the American government supported and took advantage of the situation.”
Ahmadinejad implied, though he did not definitively claim, that he favoured the second hypothesis. He went on to suggest that even if waging war were an appropriate response to a terrorist attack—he did not think it was—a thorough and independent investigation should have preceded the assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq in which hundreds of thousands of people died.
He ended his discussion of 9/11 with a proposal that the UN set up an independent fact-finding group to look into the 9/11 events.
In reporting on this event, The New York Times noted that Ahmadinejad’s comments “prompted at least 33 delegations to walk out, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Costa Rica, all 27 members of the European Union and the union’s representative.”[26]
The Times’ report was given to remarks that sidestepped the Iranian president’s assertions. Ahmadinejad’s remarks were made to endear himself to the world’s Muslim community, and especially to the Arab world. Ahmadinejad was playing the politician in Iran, where he had to contend with conservatives trying to “outflank him.” Ahmadinejad wanted to keep himself “at the center of global attention while deflecting attention away from his dismal domestic record.” Ahmadinejad “obviously delights in being provocative” and “seemed to go out of his way to sabotage any comments he made previously this week about Iran’s readiness for dialogue with the United States.”
The possibility that Ahmadinejad might have been sincere, or that there may have been an evidential basis for his views, was not mentioned.
Meanwhile, the reported response to Ahmadinejad’s talk by the United States Mission to the United Nations was harsh:
Rather than representing the aspirations and goodwill of the Iranian people, Mr. Ahmadinejad has yet again chosen to spout vile conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic slurs that are as abhorrent and delusional as they are predictable.Where were these anti-Semitic slurs? In his talk the Iranian President condemned Israeli actions against Palestinians and included as one of the possible motives of a 9/11 inside job the saving of “the Zionist regime” by U.S. government insiders. But how is either of these an anti-Semitic slur? He said nothing in his speech, hateful or otherwise, about Jews. He did not identify Zionism, as an ideology or historical movement, with Jews as a collectivity. He did not identify the state of Israel with Jews as a collectivity. He did not say “the Jews” carried out the 9/11 attacks.
And what did the U.S. Mission mean when it said that Ahmadinejad did not represent the views of Iranians? His views on 9/11 were probably much closer to the views of Iranians than were the views of the U.S. Mission. As will be explained later, the great majority of the world’s Muslims reject the official account of 9/11.
In his address to the General Assembly the following year, Ahmadinejad briefly revisited this issue, saying that, after his 2010 proposal of an investigation into 9/11, Iran was put “under pressure and threat by the government of the United States.” Moreover, he said, instead of supporting a fact-finding team, the U.S. killed the alleged perpetrator of the attacks (Osama bin Laden) without bringing him to trial.[27]
In 2012 another leader in the Muslim world made his position on 9/11 known. Dr. Mahathir Mohamad had been Prime Minister of Malaysia from 1981 to 2003 and was still in 2012 a significant power in his country and a major figure in the global south. By then he had spent considerable time discussing 9/11 with several well-known members of the U.S. movement of dissent (including William Rodriguez and David Ray Griffin)[28] and had indicated that he questioned the official account. But on November 19, 2012 he left no doubt about his position. In a 20-minute public address introducing a day-long international conference on 9/11 in Kuala Lumpur, he noted:
The official explanation for the destruction of the Twin Towers is still about an attack by suicidal Muslim extremists, but even among Americans this explanation is beginning to wear thin and to be questioned. In fact, certain American groups have thoroughly analyzed various aspects of the attack and destruction of the Twin Towers, the Pentagon building, and the reported crash in Pennsylvania. And their investigations reveal many aspects of the attack which cannot be explained by attributing them to attacks by terrorists—Muslims or non-Muslims.He went on to give details of the official narrative that he found especially unconvincing, and he concluded that the 9/11 attack:
…has divided the world into Muslim and non-Muslim and sowed the seeds of suspicion and hatred between them. It has undermined the security of nations everywhere, forcing them to spend trillions of dollars on security measures…Truly, 9/11 is the worst manmade disaster for the world since the end of the two world wars. For that reason alone it is important that we seek the truth because when truth is revealed then we can really prepare to protect and secure ourselves.[29]There is no need to quote Western media coverage of Mahathir’s remarks because, as far as I can tell, there was none—an outcome Mahathir had predicted in his talk.
Now, of course, it is possible that these current and former state officials had not seriously studied 9/11 and were simply intoxicated by anti-imperial fervour. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Those who visited Venezuela well before the public pronouncements in that country in September of 2006 noted that officials had collected books and other materials on the subject of 9/11.[30] And Malaysia’s Mahathir had been meeting people to discuss the issue for years. There is no reason to doubt what he said in his 2012 talk: “I have thought a lot about 9/11.” The dismissal of these leaders by the Western left is puzzling, to say the least.
Educator Paulo Freire, himself a victim of the 1964 coup in Brazil, pointed out years ago that when members of an oppressor class join oppressed people in their struggle for justice they may, despite the best of intentions, bring prejudices with them, “which include a lack of confidence in the people’s ability to think…and to know.”[31] Is it possible that the left leadership in the U.S. has fallen into this trap?
The dismissal of 9/11 sceptics has been carried out through a silence punctuated by occasional outbursts. The late Alexander Cockburn of Counterpunch was given to outbursts. Not content to speak of the “fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracists” and to tie them to the decline of the American left, Cockburn even took the opportunity to go beyond 9/11 and pledge allegiance once more, as he had in previous years, to the Warren Commission’s Lee Harvey Oswald hypothesis[32]—a hypothesis that had, in my opinion, been shown to be absurd half a century ago.
In a January 2017 article entitled, “American Psychosis,” Chris Hedges continued the anti-dissent campaign. Crying out that, “We feel trapped in a hall of mirrors,” Hedges announced that:
The lies fly out of the White House like flocks of pigeons: Donald Trump’s election victory was a landslide. He had the largest inauguration crowds in American history… We don’t know “who really knocked down” the World Trade Center. Torture works. Mexico will pay for the wall. Conspiracy theories are fact. Scientific facts are conspiracies.[33]The hall of mirrors is real enough but Hedges’ rant offers no escape. As far as I can discover, Hedges has made no serious study of what happened at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and has, therefore, no idea who knocked down the buildings.[34] Moreover, he appears never to have seriously thought about what a “conspiracy theory” is and what he is denouncing when he denounces such theories. Does he really mean to suggest that the American ruling class, in pursuing its interests, never conspires? [MW: my comments re Chomsky apply similarly to Hedges, a truth-seeking journalist in all other aspects of his writing that I've read, but dogmatically sticking to the company line when it comes to 9/11, despite more than adequate evidence to dispute the official story. Why, Chris, why?]
And thus the U.S. left leadership sits in the left chamber of the hall of mirrors, complaining about conspiracy theories while closing its eyes to actual conspiracies crucial to contemporary imperialism.
9/11 and public opinion
If state leaders familiar with Western imperial power have questioned the official narrative of the September 11, 2001 attacks, what about “the people” beloved of the left?
Actually, sorting out what portion of the world’s population qualifies, according to ideological criteria, as “the people” is a difficult task—an almost metaphysical exercise. So let us ask an easier question: what, according to surveys undertaken, appears to be the level of belief and unbelief in the world with respect to the 9/11 narrative?
There have been many polls. Comparing and compiling the results is very difficult since the same questions are seldom asked, in precisely the same words, in different polls. It is, however, possible to set forth grounded estimates.
In 2008, WorldPublicOpinion.org polled over 16,000 people in 17 countries. Of the total population of 2.5 billion people represented in the survey, only 39% said they thought that Al-Qaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks.[35]
The belief that Al-Qaeda carried out the attacks is, I suggest, an essential component of belief in the official narrative of 9/11. If only 39% is willing to name Al-Qaeda as responsible, then a maximum of 39% can be counted as believers of the official narrative.
This WorldPublicOpinion.org poll is, for the most part, supported by other polls, suggesting that the U.S. official narrative is, globally, a minority view. If these figures are correct, of the current world population of 7.5 billion, roughly 2.9 billion people affirm the official view of 9/11 and 4.6 billion do not affirm it.
Now, of the 61% who do not affirm the official view of 9/11, a large percentage says it does not know who carried out the attacks (by implication, it does not know what the goals of the attackers were, and so on). But the number of those who think the U.S. government was behind the attacks is by no means trivial. The figure appears to be about 14% of the world’s population.[36] If this is correct, roughly 1 billion people think the U.S. government was behind the attacks. Of course, this figure includes children. But even when we exclude everyone under 18 years of age we have 700 million adults in the world who think the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks.
It is not clear if the Guardian’s “band of September 11 conspiracy theorists,” which Castro was said to have joined, consists of this 700 million people or if it consists of the entire group of 4.6 billion non-believers. Either way, we are talking about a pretty large “band.”
Do these poll results prove that the official narrative is false? No. Do they prove that blaming elements of the U.S. government is correct? No. But these figures suggest two things. First, the official story, despite its widespread dissemination, has failed to capture the imaginations of the majority of people on the planet. Second, the minds of 700 million adults have no trouble embracing the possibility that elements of the U.S. government were behind the attacks.
What can be said about the views of that segment of the world population that is most clearly targeted by Western imperialism today?
The so-called Global War on Terror, announced shortly after the 9/11 events, has mainly targeted countries with Muslim majorities.
The 2008 WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of people in 17 countries included five countries with majority Muslim populations. Of the total Muslim population represented in the survey (399.6 million people in 2008), only 21.2% assigned guilt to Al-Qaeda.[37]
In 2011 the Pew Research Group surveyed eight Muslim populations. Of the total Muslim population represented (588.2 million in 2011), only 17% assigned guilt to Arabs.[38]
The evidence suggests that scepticism toward the official account among Muslims has been growing. In December of 2016 a published poll of British Muslims indicated that only 4% of those polled believed that “Al-Qaeda/Muslim terrorists” were responsible for 9/11, whereas 31% held the American government responsible.[39] This is remarkable given the unvarying, repetitive telling of the official story by British mainstream media and political parties.
Are British Muslims wallowing in feelings of victimhood, which have made them prey to extremists peddling “conspiracy theories?” As a matter of fact, the British think tank that sponsored the 2016 poll has drawn this conclusion. But the think tank in question, Policy Exchange, has a special relationship to the UK’s Conservative Party and appears to have carried out the poll precisely in order to put British Muslims under increased scrutiny and suspicion.[40]
Cannot the left, in its interpretation of the views of this targeted population, do better?
Most peculiar and disturbing is the tendency of left activists and leaders to join with state intelligence agencies in using the term “conspiracy theory” to dismiss those who raise questions about official state narratives.
There seems to be little awareness among these left critics of the history of the term.[41] They seem not to realize that they are employing a propaganda expression, the function of which is to discourage people from looking beneath the surface of political events, especially political events in which elements of their own government might have played a hidden and unsavoury role.
In the case of the 9/11 attacks it is important to remember, when the “conspiracy theory” accusation is made, that the lone wolf alternative, which was available for the John Kennedy assassination, is not available here. Everyone agrees that the attack was the result of multiple persons planning in secret to commit a crime. That is, the attack was the result of a conspiracy. The question is not, Was there a conspiracy? The question is, Who were the conspirators? Defamation cannot answer this question.
Conclusion
Suppose our imaginations can embrace the possibility that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by elements in the U.S. government. In that case what do we do next? There is no mystery. Once the imagination stops filtering out a hypothesis and allows it into the realm of the possible, it can be put to the test. Evidence and reason must now do the job.[42] Imagination cannot settle the question of truth or falsity any more than ideology, morality, or “common sense.”
I am not concerned in this article to demonstrate the truth of the “inside job” hypothesis of the 9/11 attacks. Ten years of research have led me to conclude that it is correct, but in the present paper I am concerned only with the preliminary, but vital, issue of imagination. Those who cannot imagine this hypothesis to be true will leave it unexamined, and, in the worst of worlds, will contribute to the silencing of dissenters. The left, in this case, will betray the best of its tradition and abandon both the targets of imperial oppression and their spokespeople.
Fidel Castro sounded the warning in his November 23, 1963 speech:
Intellectuals and lovers of peace should understand the danger that maneuvers of this kind could mean to world peace, and what a conspiracy of this type, what a Machiavellian policy of this nature, could lead to.
websites:
Re-Think 9/11.
9/11 Truth Action Project.
books (just a small sample of what's available):
9/11: The Big Lie. by Thierry Meyssan
9/11 Truth Action Project.
books (just a small sample of what's available):
9/11: The Big Lie. by Thierry Meyssan
9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press. by David Ray Griffin
9/11 Ten Years Later: When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed. by David Ray Griffin
How America Was Lost: From 9/11 to the Police/Warfare State. by Paul Craig Roberts
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. by Michael C. Ruppert
Generally speaking, conspiracy theories form where there is a vacuum of verifiable facts associated with a controversial, usually tragic event. The concept has evolved over the years and is a part of our popular culture. There are legions of conspiracy theorists and “truthers” who have devoted their lives to certain theories, and there are legions of skeptics who have devoted their lives to debunking those theories. All the while, conspiracy theories of every stripe and variety festoon the footnotes of history. Even the origin of the phrase itself is subject to conspiracy theory, as some researchers have argued that the CIA invented and promulgated the term in order to marginalize fringe thinkers and neutralize investigations.
1) The Gulf of Tonkin Incident
The Gulf of Tonkin incident, a major escalator of US involvement in the Vietnam War, never actually occurred.
It’s true. The original incident – also sometimes referred to as the USS Maddox Incident(s) –involved the destroyer USS Maddox supposedly engaging three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats as part of an intelligence patrol. The Maddox fired almost 300 shells.
President Lyndon B. Johnson promptly drafted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which became his administration’s legal justification for military involvement in Vietnam. The problem is the event never happened.
In 2005, a declassified internal National Security Agency study revealed that there were NO North Vietnamese naval vessels present during the incident. So, what was the Maddox firing at? In 1965, President Johnson commented: “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”
Worth pointing out: The NSA’s own historian, Robert J. Hanyok, wrote a report stating that the agency had deliberately distorted intelligence reports in 1964. He concluded: “The parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq War make it all the more worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964.”
2) Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
Between 1932 and 1972, the US Public Health Service conducted a clinical study on rural African American men who had contracted syphilis. The Public Health Service never informed these men they had a sexually transmitted disease, nor did they offer treatment, even after penicillin became available as a cure in the 1940s.
Tragically, it’s true. Rather than receiving treatment, the subjects of these studies were told they had “bad blood.”
When World War II began, 250 of the men registered for the draft and were only then, for the first time, informed they had syphilis. Even then, the PHS denied them treatment.
By the early 1970s, 128 of the original 399 men had died of syphilis and syphilis-related complications, 40 of their wives had the disease and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis.
Worth pointing out: A similar experiment conducted on prisoners, soldiers, and patients of a mental hospital in Guatemala actually involved the PHS deliberately infecting the patients and then treating them with antibiotics.
3) Project MKUltra
The CIA ran secret mind control experiments on US citizens from the 1950s until 1973.
It’s so true that in 1995 President Clinton actually issued a formal apology on behalf of the US government.
Essentially, the CIA used drugs, electronics, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, verbal and sexual abuse, and torture to conduct experimental behavioral engineering experiments on subjects. The program subcontracted hundreds of these projects to over 80 different institutions, including universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies.
Most of this was uncovered in 1977 when a Freedom of Information Act exposed 20,000 previously classified documents and triggered a series of Senate hearings. Because CIA Director Richard Helms had most of the more damning MKULTRA files destroyed in 1973, much of what actually occurred during these experiments is still unknown and, of course, not a single person was brought to justice.
Worth pointing out: There is growing evidence that Theodore Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber, was a subject of the Project MKULTRA while he was at Harvard in the late 1950s.
4) Operation Northwoods
The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military drew up and approved plans to create acts of terrorism on US soil in order to sway the American public into supporting a war against Cuba.
It’s true and the documents are out there.
Fortunately, President Kennedy rejected the plan, which included: innocent Americans being shot dead on the streets; boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere; people being framed for bombings they did not commit; and planes being hijacked.
Additionally, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, planned to fabricate evidence that would implicate Fidel Castro and Cuban refugees as the perpetrators of the attacks.
Perhaps most horrifyingly, Lemnitzer planned for an elaborately staged incident whereby a Cuban aircraft would attack and shoot down a plane full of college students.
5) CIA Drug Trafficking
During the 1980s, the CIA facilitated the sale of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army.
It’s convoluted and complex, but it’s true.
Gary Webb’s book Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion outlines how CIA-backed Contras smuggled cocaine into the U.S. and then distributed crack to Los Angeles gangs, pocketing the profits. The CIA directly aided the drug dealers to raise money for the Contras.
“This drug network,” Webb wrote in a 1996 San Jose MercuryNews article, “opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the ‘crack’ capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America . . . and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.’s gangs to buy automatic weapons.”
Worth pointing out: On December 10, 2004, Webb committed suicide under suspicious circumstances, namely the fact that he used two bullets to shoot himself in the head.
6) Operation Mockingbird
In the late 1940s, as the Cold War was just getting underway, the CIA launched a top secret project called Operation Mockingbird. Their goal was to buy influence and control among the major media outlets. They also planned to put journalists and reporters directly on the CIA payroll, which some claim is ongoing to this day. The architects of this plan were Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post), who planned to enlist American news organizations and journalists to basically become spies and propagandists.
Their list of entrenched agents eventually included journalists from ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, and Copley News Service. By the 1950s, the CIA had infiltrated the nation’s businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives.
Fortunately, our media is no longer lured in by corporations and governments to disseminate propaganda and disinformation….hmmm, never mind–strike that last statement.
7) COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO was a series of clandestine, illegal FBI projects that infiltrated domestic political organizations to discredit and smear them. This included critics of the Vietnam War, civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King and a wide variety of activists and journalists.
The acts committed against them included psychological warfare, slander using forged documents and false reports in the media, harassment, wrongful imprisonment and, according to some, intimidation and possibly violence and assassination.
Similar and possibly more sophisticated tactics are still used today, including NSA monitoring (see #10).
8) Operation Snow White
Operation Snow White is the name given to an unprecedented infiltration of the US government by the Church of Scientology during the 1970s. They stole classified government files regarding Scientology from dozens of government agencies.
In 1977, the FBI finally cracked Snow White open which led to the arrest and imprisonment of a senior Church official.
The core mission of the program was to expose and legally expunge “all false and secret files of the nations of operating areas” and to enable Church seniors and L. Ron Hubbard himself to “frequent all Western nations without threat.” By the end, of course, there was nothing legal about their endeavours.
9) Secret Global Economic Policies
For years, activists who feared a sinister globalist corporatocracy were told they were being paranoid. Whether you want to call it the New World Order or not: they were right.
In 2013, WikiLeaks released the secretly negotiated draft text for the entire TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) Intellectual Property Rights Chapter. It revealed a closed-door regional free trade agreement being negotiated by countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says TPP has “extensive negative ramifications for users’ freedom of speech, right to privacy and due process, and [will] hinder peoples’ abilities to innovate.”
Worth pointing out: In June 2014, WikiLeaks revealed the even more far-reaching Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), a 50-country agreement that will promote unprecedented levels of privatization across the world. The agreement will essentially prevent governments from returning public services into public hands. This could dramatically affect our ability to enact environmental regulations and keep workers safe.
10) The US Government Illegally Spies On Its Own Citizens
This used to be laughed at as a dystopian fantasy derived from an overactive imagination, Orwell’s 1984, and a juvenile distrust of the government. When you claimed “they” were spying on you, people labeled you a paranoid conspiracy theorist, a tinfoil hat-wearing loon.
Even after it was revealed that the NSA has been illegally eavesdropping on us and collecting our cell phone metadata for over a decade, people still hedged on the meaning of it. Yes, they are analyzing our transmissions, but it’s under the auspices of national security. “In a post 9/11 world” certain liberties must be sacrificed for the sake of security, right?
It turns out that is patently untrue. Not only is there no evidence that the NSA has protected us from terrorism, there is growing evidence that it makes us more vulnerable. Thanks to revelations about the NSA and their Prism project, we know that the scope of the NSA’s eavesdropping is even beyond what we originally believed.
In early June of 2014, the Washington Post reported that almost 90% of the data being collected by NSA surveillance programs is from Internet users with no connection to terrorist activities. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, this is in clear violation of the constitution.
The ACLU is pursuing a lawsuit against the NSA, claiming that the dragnet-style mass collection of data violates the Fourth Amendment right of privacy as well as the First Amendment rights of free speech and association.
Introduction
Some people have argued that global warming is a conspiratorial lie, deceiving the public for pernicious reasons. The most well known of these people is Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who in 2012 published a book entitled The Greatest Hoax, which warns people against “the global warming conspiracy.”
Some members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have endorsed this view. Believing that the Bush-Cheney administration conspired with others to claim falsely that America was attacked by Muslims on 9/11, they say that the government’s false conspiracy theory about 9/11 should make us suspicious that other governmental claims may also be conspiracies to mislead the public.
Suspicions about governmental conspiracies are not baseless. Claims that the U.S. government has given a false account of this or that event are, however, generally rejected by the press. Since the time of The Warren Commission Report, which did not quiet suspicions that the assassination of President Kennedy had been an inside job, beliefs about huge government crimes have been derided by the CIA and the press as “conspiracy theories” in the pejorative sense of the term. People who give voice to such beliefs are ridiculed as “conspiracy theorists,” a label that implies that the conspiracy claim is obviously false.
Nevertheless, as Lance deHaven-Smith has discussed in his 2013 book Conspiracy Theory in America, it is well known that the U.S. government has indeed orchestrated conspiracies with enormous consequences, such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the Iran-Contra affair, as well as, more recently, the claims that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks and was prepared to use weapons of mass destruction.
So if people, believing that there is good evidence that 9/11 was an inside job, are aware of the U.S. government’s involvement in these other conspiracies, there is no good reason to doubt that there are additional examples of conspiracies that have been engineered at the highest levels.
In particular, if it is assumed that 9/11 was indeed an inside job, would this assumption provide a good basis for suspecting that the theory of global warming has resulted from a deceitful conspiracy?
The phrase “theory of global warming” is used here as shorthand for a fourfold conviction:
Because this fourfold conviction is held by virtually all climate scientists around the world, the theory of global warming can also be called “the position of climate science.” Individuals and organizations who dispute climate science in this sense are referred to as “climate-science deniers,” “climate-change deniers” or “global-warming deniers.” Often the term “denialism” is used for the active argument against climate science, with those engaged in this argument called “denialists.”
I ask the question about the relevance of 9/11 to climate science not only because many members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have supported global-warming denialism, but also because the success of this denialist movement has been disastrous.
As I have documented in a 2015 book, the denialist movement was formed and financed by the fossil-fuel industry, and the doubt it created has been used to delay legislation to restrict the use of fossil fuels – a delay that may result in the destruction of civilization. Climate deniers call this fear “alarmism.” But there are times when alarm is appropriate and, my book argues, this is the supreme example.
Believing that it is a shame that many members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have been misled into supporting self-interested propaganda by the fossil-fuel industries, I ask whether this movement’s basic conviction - that the official story about 9/11 is a lie - provides a basis for accepting climate-science denial.
The transition from the one to the other is typically made on the basis of two beliefs:
The first two parts of this article looks at these two beliefs in order; the third part argues that we do indeed have a climate emergency.
Part I: Are 9/11 and Global Warming Analogous?
Because the claims about global warming are analogous to the government’s false claims about 9/11, some people believe, these claims are also probably false. But the Bush-Cheney administration’s claims about 9/11 are not at all analogous to the widely accepted views about global warming.
9/11, Global Warming, and Science
A well-known member of the 9/11 Truth Movement, who writes under the name “Victronix,” has argued that standard beliefs about 9/11 and global warming are not only very different, but also different in ways that prevent 9/11 beliefs from providing an analogy to scientists’ belief about global warming. The idea that global warming is a lie, she pointed out, implies that “the vast majority of the scientific community is working in collusion to create a worldwide hoax - including Russia and China and the entire industrialized world - that a worldwide environmental crisis is unfolding.” In other words, thousands of scientists from many countries around the world, including countries that are strongly opposed to each other, all agreed to tell a huge lie.
By contrast, she said, 9/11 involved “a single national government (and collusion by other intelligence and government leaders who also benefit) with highly limited and controlled science whose evidence is completely controlled, destroyed or hidden.” This “controlled science” is very different from the science supporting global warming belief: “Scientists all over the world can and are investigating and confirming the same findings over and over.” Unlike the purported events used to claim that Muslims attacked America on 9/11, the science of global warming is based on “ongoing events whose evidence is available to everyone all over the world to examine simultaneously using the scientific method and simple tools to measure and analyze.”
Making this point more succinctly, Australians Will Grant and Rod Lamberts wrote: “The idea of an international conspiracy across dozens of disciplines, hundreds of institutions and thousands of individuals is honestly laughable.”
The different relations to science can also be stated in another way: The theory of global warming is analogous not to the U.S. government’s account of the 9/11 attacks, but to the 9/11 Truth Movement’s rejection of the government’s account: Just as the 9/11 Truth Movement is supported by scientists from various fields, including physics and chemistry (as well as by students of architecture and engineering), the idea that fossil fuels are causing global warming and hence climate change is supported by most of the scientists who publish about climate change – indeed, at least 97.5% of them.
So this is the appropriate analogy: The 9/11 Truth Movement, which is supported by scientific evidence, is disputed by the U.S. government, which the 9/11 Truth Movement regards as behind the 9/11 attacks. And the theory of global warming, which is based on scientific evidence, is disputed by the fossil-fuel industries, which climate scientists see as primarily responsible for global warming.
So in each case, the views of independent scientists are disputed by huge enterprises, which clearly have self-interested reasons for challenging the scientific evidence.
Accordingly, the idea that 9/11 skepticism is similar to global warming skepticism has the relationship backwards. When it is claimed that “they” are deceiving the public about global warming, just as “they” deceived the public about the 9/11 attacks, it is necessary to determine the identity of the “they.” The best clue to the likely “they” in each case is to determine who would have benefitted from deception.
The 9/11 Truth Movement has considerable consensus on the question of who benefited from the official account of 9/11: The Bush-Cheney administration (which wanted Afghanistan’s minerals and natural gas and also planned to attack Iraq for its oil); the biggest U.S. oil companies (the CEOs of which were covertly members of Dick Cheney’s 2001 energy task force); Israel (as stated by the 9/11 Commission Report’s executive director, Philip Zelikow); the U.S. military (the budget of which went way up); and the U.S. intelligence agencies (whose budgets doubled after 9/11). But who are the “they” with regard to global warming?
Who Benefits from Climate Denial?
Victronix concluded her discussion of global warming by asking, “who benefits from the claims that human involvement is a hoax?” The answer to that question is, of course, fossil-fuel companies, which have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to promote denial of climate science.
For many years, the main promoter of climate-science denialism was ExxonMobil, the world’s most successful corporation, earning roughly $40 billion a year and paying its CEO over $30 million a year.
Besides giving millions of dollars to scientists, lobbyists, and politicians to promote climate denial, ExxonMobil gave at least $25 million since 1998 to support some 100 climate-denying front groups. ExxonMobil thereby created the impression that climate denial had arisen spontaneously from scientists, politicians, and ordinary citizens. According to a 2009 article by Raw Story, a “group promoting climate skepticism has extensive ties to Exxon-Mobil” (it was on a website responding to this article that Victronix posted her comments).
The group in question, which is named the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, published a report entitled Climate Science Reconsidered. Arguing that global warming is not human-caused, this report said: “Nature, not human activity, rules the planet.” In addition, reported the highly praised book Merchants of Doubt, the report said that global warming is “unequivocally good news,” because rising CO2 levels “increase plant growth and make plants more resistant to drought and pests.”
This denialist report was released and promoted by the Heartland Institute, which between 1998 and 2009 had received at least $676,500 from ExxonMobil. The lead author of this report was S. Fred Singer, who has had a notoriously bad scientific career, having previously been proven wrong in a series of issues in which he contested the scientific consensus. But his career path has been financially successful.
In 1998, Singer started an organization called the Science and Environmental Policy Project, in order to begin a book on global warming, and for which ExxonMobil gave him $20,000 between 1998 and 2000.
As Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway reported in Merchants of Doubt, Singer had previously helped the tobacco industry’s effort to avoid regulations about environmental smoke, also called secondhand smoke. Singer used this project to promote what he called “sound science” and to denounce “junk science,” by which he meant, specifically, the EPA’s 1992 report that secondhand smoke causes cancer. Singer also became an advisor to The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, which was funded by Philip Morris to attack the EPA’s report, even though Philip Morris and hence Singer knew that the EPA report - which was based on scientific studies from around the world - was sound, not junk, science.
Singer had earlier earned money by joining the efforts of industries that wanted to prevent legislation to reduce acid rain. By 1983, there was an overwhelming scientific consensus that acid rain was produced by the sulfur released during the burning of fossil fuels, and the United States and Canada were set to sign an agreement to reduce the emissions of sulfur. But the Reagan Administration, which strongly opposed any such legislation, appointed Singer to an acid-rain task force, for which he was allowed to write a separate appendix, claiming that the science was still uncertain. As a result, the United States did not sign the agreement with Canada, and sulfur dioxide levels did not begin declining until 1990 when legislation based on the scientific consensus was finally passed.
Singer also, while serving as the chief scientist for Reagan’s Department of Transportation, argued against the scientific consensus that a growing hole in the ozone layer was caused by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were used in spray cans, refrigerators, and air conditioners. The aerosol industry, seeking to prevent legislation, hired scientists to dispute the scientific consensus, and Singer joined in, arguing that an “ozone scare” had been created by “corrupt scientists.” The scientists who had shown that the CFCs in the stratosphere destroyed ozone won a Nobel Prize, so Singer attacked the Nobel committee! But eventually, Singer’s argument “was proved wrong, when CFCs were banned and the ozone hole began to repair itself.”
Nevertheless, after having been wrong time and time again, Singer was asked by the Heartland Institute to be the lead author of its report, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, which claims that the burning of fossil fuels is not creating dangerous global warming. Besides whatever money Singer made for writing this book, he has also served as a consultant by several other organizations funded by ExxonMobil, including Frontiers of Freedom (which ExxonMobil gave at least $1,272,000) and the National Center for Policy Analysis (which ExxonMobil gave $615,900).
Did Singer actually believe his arguments about secondhand smoke, acid rain, the ozone layer, and fossil fuels? This seems unlikely, especially given information learned from leaked documents. For example, by 1965, showed one document, tobacco industry scientists were “unanimous in their opinion that [tobacco] smoke is . . . carcinogenic.”
The same pattern appears to have occurred with regard to global warming. A document shows that in 1995, the oil industry’s own scientific advisors said: “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases is well established and cannot be denied.” Nevertheless, just as the cigarette companies continued to deny the existence of evidence showing that cigarettes cause cancer, ExxonMobil not only continued to deny that oil and gas emissions cause climate change but also paid tens of millions to hire others, such as Fred Singer, to support this denial.
In the meantime, Koch Industries, which is invested in various kinds of fossil fuels, including the Canadian tar sands, has begun providing even more financial support for global-warming denialism than ExxonMobil: Between 1997 and 2010, Koch Industries gave over $67 million for this purpose. At that point, the Kochs no longer allowed their contributions to be traced. But these contributions may have become even higher, as suggested by stories in the Guardian and the Washington Post.
Two dark money trusts (which promise their contributors complete anonymity), named Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, between them doled out $118 million to 102 groups, reported the Guardian. The purpose of the money was to help “build a vast network of thinktanks and activist groups working to a single purpose: to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarising ‘wedge issue.’" This funding stream, said the Guardian, “far outstripped the support from more visible opponents of climate action such as the oil industry or the conservative billionaire Koch brothers.”
However, it is possible that much of this money actually came from the Kochs: A 2014 Washington Post story suggested that these two dark money trusts were simply part of a “Koch-Backed Political Network,” which raised over $400 million for right-wing political causes in 2012.
In any case, whether Charles and David Koch have given over $100 million to support climate denialism, or “only” $67 million, this is pocket change for them: By 2010, their company, Koch Industries, was worth $35 billion; by 2013, they had brought their wealth up to $68 billion. They evidently find the use of a little pocket change to promote climate denial, and hence to head off legislation to restrict fossil-fuel burning, a worthwhile investment.
Who Would Benefit from Fabricating Global Warming?
There is a clear answer, accordingly, to the question of who benefits from climate denial. But if climate science is a lie, who would benefit from spreading this lie?
The idea that the “government” – perhaps the U.S. government, or U.S. and European governments, or perhaps most of the world’s governments - fabricated global warming would make this lie parallel to the 9/11 lie, with each being a government-created lie. But this would make no sense. Neither the U.S. government nor governments in general have wanted to reduce their burning of fossil fuels. The climate scientists of the IPCC – indeed, most climate scientists everywhere - have been pleading with governments to reduce their fossil-fuel use, but in almost all countries, the use has continued to rise.
Some people suggest that the “government” in question is the United Nations. But the U.N. is not a government and has no power to act apart from the willingness of the nations to follow its suggestions – or, in the case of the Security Council, of the nations constituting it. The U.N. did create the IPCC and supports its work, but it has no power to act on climate change other than calling meetings and publishing reports. And the IPCC did not create the idea that emissions from fossil fuels are causing global warming, which in turn causes climate change. Rather, the IPCC was formed in response to a growing consensus among climate scientists about these connections.
So, if there is a culprit for a global warming hoax, it must be the scientists themselves. And that is, indeed, what many deniers claim. For example, a 2007 documentary film, “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” argued that “the publicized scientific consensus is the product of a ‘global warming activist industry’ driven by a desire for research funding.”
Some climate scientists do indeed apply for grants, and a few of them actually receive them. But there are five reasons to doubt that the desire by scientists for funding could explain their published statements about global warming:
Although there is considerable fraud in science – as has been extensively documented - scientists who engage in fraud are a small minority. Although there are many reasons to criticize mainstream science, few scientists would consciously engage in fraud. Of course, scientists who work for corporations or government agencies must sometimes either falsify evidence or lose their jobs. Members of the 9/11 Truth Movement believe that this was the case with the scientists at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology), which was tasked with writing the reports about the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC 7. But this was an example of “controlled science,” which, as Victronix said, “is very different from the [peer-reviewed] science supporting global warming.”
Even if a few important climate scientists had published false evidence for global warming, they would not have been able to persuade most of the rest of the world’s thousands of climate scientists to support their false claims. The fact of fraud by individual scientists provides no evidence that thousands of scientists around the world could be persuaded to engage in fraud.
The support for global warming comes from a wide variety of types of evidence. The idea that all of these different experiments and tests could have been coordinated to support the same bogus conclusions makes the mind boggle.
If most scientists are primarily motivated by money, they would have gone into some other line of work. It is true that a few people, after going into science for noble reasons, have become devoted to making money to an unseemly degree. But getting government grants is seldom a road to riches. As Grant and Lamberts said: “Tell the TCCD [Typical Climate Change Denier] to go to any university car park and count the luxury vehicles parked near science buildings. They won’t even need all their fingers to keep track.”
There are indeed scientists who have made significant amounts of money by writing about globl warming, but these are scientists who have argued against climate science. For example (in addition to Singer), take Patrick Michaels, who has written many books and articles with titles such as “Global Warming Myth” and Climate of Extremes. Michaels has served as a consultant for a large number of climate denial organizations funded by ExxonMobil. And in 2006, a furor was raised when it was revealed that a coal-burning electric association had, at its members’ expense, paid Michaels $100,000 “to help confuse the issue of global warming.”
Again, if there is an analogy between 9/11 and global warming, it is not between the official 9/11 story and the theory of global warming. It is between climate science and the 9/11 Truth Community’s position. Just as large numbers of independent scientists have rejected the official 9/11 story, most climate scientists reject the idea that global warming is a hoax.
And just as a few scientists whose salaries are paid by the U.S. government have supported the official account of 9/11, Singer, Michaels, and some other scientists paid by the fossil-fuel industry have endorsed climate-change denial. In the one case, independent science is opposed by Big Government; in the other, independent science is opposed by Big Carbon. In both cases, the scientific evidence is overwhelmed by Big Money, whether this be governmental or fossil-fuel money.
The relation between climate denial and the 9/11 attacks has been described as even closer by a former U.S. Senate candidate from Vermont, Craig Hill. “[W]hat the 9/11 false-flag op and denying global warming have in common,” wrote Jerry Mazza in a summary of Hill’s thesis, “is oil, and gas . . . , and the desire to quench an unquenchable thirst for these fossil fuels.” Moreover, Hill said, just as the perpetrators of 9/11 shrouded it in unscientific myth and lie, the oil companies have also “shrouded the evil effects of warming in unscientific myth and lie.”
In other words, said Hill, both the Bush-Cheney administration and the climate deniers funded by ExxonMobil and the Kochs have foisted a false, unscientific theory on the world, especially the American people, for the sake of oil. (To be sure, Hill’s statement would need to be qualified by the fact that, as mentioned earlier, oil did not provide the only motive for the 9/11 attacks.)
Part II: Does Scientific Evidence Disprove Global Warming?
In addition to suspecting global warming to be a hoax, some members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have endorsed the view, promulgated by climate denialists, that the true facts do not support the global warming theory. Instead, these denialists argue, the facts show the global warming theory to be a fabrication.
One of those members is Australian chemist Frank Legge. Besides warning Victronix that she should “be careful about using global warming in the argument,” because it is “looking pretty shaky from a scientific point of view,” he in 2008 wrote an article called “The Global Warming Emergency.” Because this was so many years ago, I wrote Legge in November 2014 to ask if he still stands by that essay. He replied that if writing it now, he would update a few items, but “the general thrust would be exactly the same.”
Legge said that the conclusion that there is a climate emergency would require a threefold argument: (1) Global warming is occurring, it is not trivial, and the claim that the temperature and sea level will continue to rise must be based on good science; (2) “the current and predicted temperature is unusual and dangerous”; and (3) “the warming is largely caused by man-made carbon dioxide.”
1. Is Global Warming Significant and Destined to Rise?
Suggesting that global warming, if it is occurring at all, will be minor and short-lived, Legge based this suggestion on several claims, which he derived from climate-science deniers.
Satellite Data
In one of his arguments, Legge wrote: “The recent warming period is giving signs of coming to an end: satellite measurements of global atmospheric temperature have been declining this decade.” In support of that argument, Legge referred to an argument by Roy Spencer, one of the handful of climate scientists who reject the consensus view. But citing Spencer’s claim about satellite measurements hardly adds credibility to Legge’s argument.
In the 1990s, Spencer and fellow climate denier John Christy argued that the satellite data showed no warming – that the troposphere was not warming in conjunction with surface warming.
Joe Romm, a physicist who founded Climate Progress - one of the most highly respected websites dealing with climate science - said that Spencer and Christy had “created one of the most enduring denier myths,” namely, “that the satellite data didn’t show the global warming that the surface temperature data did.” A scientist on the RealClimate website wrote:
"Spencer and Christy sat by for most of a decade allowing — indeed encouraging — the use of their data set as an icon for global warming skeptics. They committed serial errors in the data analysis, but . . . did little or nothing to root out possible sources of errors, and left it to others to clean up the mess."
Spencer and Christy’s treatment of this issue, along with some others, led Romm to write an article asking, “Should You Believe Anything John Christy and Roy Spencer Say?”
Urban Heat Island Effect
Besides supporting Spencer’s argument for preferring satellite to other evidence, Legge said: “There is also ongoing debate about whether proper allowance has been made for the confounding effect of urban encroachment on temperature stations.” Legge was here referring to the so-called urban heat island (UHI) effect, which can occur when weather stations are situated in urban areas, where the air tends to be warmer than rural areas. Fellow climate denier Patrick Michaels has claimed that at least half of the alleged global warming is due to this phenomenon.
Legge, however, cited the climate denialist who has made this case most strongly, former TV weatherman Anthony Watts, who has a website called “Watts Up With That.” Watts had long argued that temperature recordings have been skewed by the fact that most recordings are made in urban areas. In 2010, Watts wrote: “UHI is easily observable. I’ve been telling readers about UHI since this blog started.”
In 2010, when Watts made this comment, it seemed for various reasons that a project called the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, organized by UC Berkeley professor Richard Muller, was soon to verify Watts’ claims. As Joe Romm explained:
Muller had long been critical of climate science, believing that many scientists and their admirers, including Al Gore, had exaggerated the evidence. Moreover, the “Climategate” charges made him suspect that climate scientists had “concealed discordant data,” about which he examined the claims of denialist bloggers.
Muller chose as a climate scientist Judith Curry, who, according to Romm, has “now taken the crown as the most debunked person on the science blogosphere” and who has, in fact, “abandon[ed] science.”
Climate denying billionaire Charles Koch was to fund the study, and Watts and other deniers were even allowed to work with the BEST team.
However, Muller chose good scientists to carry out the study, including lead scientist Robert Rohde, and the study did not work out as deniers expected. Based on data from some 40,000 weather stations around the world, the study’s results, reported the BBC, were “remarkably similar to those produced by the world's three most important and established groups, whose work had been decried as unreliable and shoddy in climate sceptic circles” – namely, the reports by NASA, NOAA, and the “collaboration between the UK Met Office and UEA's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), from which the emails that formed the basis of the ‘Climategate’ furor were hacked.” Muller told the BBC: “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK.”
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Muller said:
“When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. . . . Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.”
Writing in the New York Times, Muller called himself “a converted skeptic.” He now believes, he said, that the prior estimates of the rate of warming increase were correct and that “essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.”
Before Muller’s report had been published, Watts had written: “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise.” However, after learning what the result actually was, Watts reneged. He first refused to accept Muller’s report on the grounds that it had not yet been peer reviewed. “When the science and peer review is finished,” Watts predicted, “the results are likely to look different.”
However, when the report was published (in a peer-reviewed journal), the results, contained in five papers, were not different. In an interview, moreover, Muller emphasized the report’s main point about UHI, saying “urban heat islands contribute essentially zero to the warming.” This report, which challenged Watts’ main claim to fame, was never accepted by him, in spite of his promise.
Sensitivity: Feedback as Negative
Climate scientists acknowledge that they have an imperfect understanding of “climate sensitivity,” meaning the amount the planet will warm because of the various feedbacks affecting the climate. Sensitivity is usually discussed in terms of the temperature increase to be caused by a doubling of the preindustrial CO2 concentration of 275 parts per mission (ppm) to 550 ppm. If the sensitivity is extremely low, then doubling the concentration of CO2 would not raise the planet’s temperature much. But if sensitivity is very high, the doubling will be catastrophic. The IPCC puts the likely temperature increase to range between 2 and 4.5°C, with 3°C being most likely, and James Hansen, whose ideas are taken very seriously by fellow climate scientists, believes the increase to be near the top of that range.
By contrast, Roy Spencer argued that the sensitivity is much lower – so low in fact, reported Legge, that the feedback will be negative, not positive, so that “there is no cause for alarm.”
In 2011, Spencer argued this case in a paper that was severely criticized by climate scientists. For example, Kevin Trenberth wrote:
“[I]t is evident that this paper did not get an adequate peer review. It should not have been published [because] there is no merit whatsoever in this paper.”
The fact that it was published led the journal’s editor to resign, saying that Spencer’s paper was "fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted” by the team of reviewers, which he (the editor) had chosen.
2. Current and Predicted Warming: Not Unusual and Dangerous?
In line with Legge’s claim that insofar as there is currently some global warming, it is minor and short-lived, he also argued that the warming is not unusual and dangerous.
Medieval Warm Period
He based this view primarily on the Medieval Warm Period, citing denialist stories claiming that during this period – which occurred between the 10th and 15th centuries, A.D. - the planet was warmer than today. Referring to the fact that the Vikings had farms in Greenland, Legge said that “it appears that the present temperature is not yet quite as high as during the Medieval warming.”
However, a Skeptical Science article reported: “The Medieval Warm Period was not a global phenomenon. Warmer conditions were concentrated in certain regions.” There were indeed areas that were warmer than they were in 1990. However, “Some regions were even colder than during the Little Ice Age. To claim the Medieval Warm Period [MWP] was warmer than today is to narrowly focus on a few regions that showed unusual warmth.” When considered globally, “temperatures during the Medieval Period were less than today.”
In addition, a 2012 report in the journal Geology, headed by a scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said that “the MWP wasn’t all that warm after all - and certainly not as warm as the climate is today.” Even islands 400 miles north of Norway during the past 25 years, he said, have been “3.6°F and 4.5°F higher . . . than the summers the Vikings enjoyed.”
Present Warm Period
On the question of whether today’s temperature is dangerous in the sense that it might lead to runaway global warming, Legge argued that this “seems unlikely . . . as it did not happen in the previous warm periods.” However, that probability cannot be judged apart from the question of what has caused the recent warming, which Legge assumed to be just one more example of natural variability.
Legge’s assumption does not fit the facts. One problem is that, after a long period of decline, there was an unprecedented increase in global temperature in the 20th century. A graph tracking the temperature over the past millenium shows the 20th century as a virtually vertical line, making the graph look somewhat like a hockey stick – a change that could not be considered natural. Ever since physicist Michael Mann used this graph in a 1998 paper, denialists have argued that it was based on errors - saying, for example, that the “hockey stick is broken.” However, Mann’s conclusions have been confirmed by several studies using different sources, including boreholes, corals, ice cores, stalagmites, and tree rings.
The attempt to explain the 20th-century increase as an example of natural variation is made even more difficult by a 2013 study in Science of the global temperature for the past 11,300 years. This study showed that the planet, after the Medieval Warm Period, had been cooling for 5,000 years. But in the 20th century, this long period of cooling was abruptly ended, with the rate of warming since 1900 being 50 times greater than the rate of cooling in the previous 5000 years.
Climate deniers try to explain this 20th-century uptick in the global temperature by increased radiation from the sun, which was true of the Medieval Warm Period. However, the increase in solar radiation leveled off after 1950, so that since about 1970, greenhouse gases have clearly been the main contributor to warming. Since 1970, in fact, the sun and the climate temperature have been moving in opposite directions: While the sun has had a slight cooling trend, the climate has been getting warmer and warmer. As one scientist put it, “We should be cool, but we're not.”
This contrast has been articulated by physicist Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “Within a hundred years, the cooling of the previous 5000 years was undone,” said Rahmstorf. “[W]ithout the increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans, the slow cooling trend would have continued.”
3. The Role of Carbon Dioxide
In arguing his third claim – that CO2 cannot explain whatever recent global warming there has been – Legge employed several of the common denialist points, all of which have been answered in the literature, most systematically at Skeptical Science.
CO2 Minor Compared with Water Vapor?
One of Legge’s reasons for claiming that increased CO2 cannot explain much is that “it plays a minor role compared with water vapour.” His argument is that, because water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas, constituting most of the greenhouse effect, CO2 is insignificant.
However, although water vapor is indeed the dominant greenhouse gas, it is also the dominant feedback agent. And as CO2 emissions make the temperature go up, evaporation increases, putting more water vapor in the atmosphere, which further increases the temperature. There is, accordingly, a positive feedback loop. The water vapor feedback doubles the warming that would be caused by rising CO2 alone. As Skeptical Science explained:
“Without any feedbacks, a doubling of CO2 would warm the globe around 1°C. Taken on its own, water vapour feedback roughly doubles the amount of CO2 warming. When other feedbacks are included . . . , the total warming from a doubling of CO2 emissions is around 3°C.”
Another important factor is that, whereas the water vapor in the atmosphere is short-lived (it arises from evaporation and then falls as rain and snow), CO2 stays there for about a century. So after CO2 enters the atmosphere, it will increase the water vapor, with its powerful greenhouse effect, for a long time.
Accordingly, one should not denigrate the importance of CO2 by comparison with water vapor. Rather, they work together. It is the positive feedback relation between them that explains why the climate is so sensitive to additional CO2 emissions.
CO2 Increase Followed Temperature Increase?
According to Legge, it is an “inconvenient fact” for Al Gore “that the temperature rises about 1000 years before the CO2 level rises.” Legge was referring to the fact that, based on Antarctic ice core data from the past 400,000 years, changes in CO2 level followed temperature changes by some 600 to 1000 years. This fact has been used by climate deniers, such as U.S. Congressman Joe Barton of Texas, to argue that today’s global warming could not possibly be explained by the increasing percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere.
However, whereas the initial increase in temperature during this period was due to changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, this increase led to a positive feedback process: The rise in ocean temperatures led to releases of CO2 from the oceans into the atmosphere, which increased the planet’s warming, which in turn led to the release of more CO2 from the oceans, and so on.
As Skeptical Science explained:
“This positive feedback is necessary to trigger the shifts between glacials and interglacials as the effect of orbital changes is too weak to cause such variation.”
In fact, as Skeptical Science continued, “While the orbital cycles triggered the initial warming, overall, more than 90% of the glacial-interglacial warming occurred after that atmospheric CO2 increase.“
Global Temperature Pause?
In a third argument against the role of rising CO2, Legge said that “it is hard to see any correlation between the rising CO2 level and temperature during the last decade.” This statement reflects the apparent fact that, although CO2 and the surface air temperature of the planet went hand in hand in the 1980s and ‘90s, the two seemed to diverge in the present century: While the CO2 ppm continued to rise, the increase in the air temperature seemed to slow down. This appearance led to the conclusion that there has been an end to - or at least a pause in - global warming.
However, that conclusion was based on the equation of the planet’s temperature with its surface air temperature. This is a very big mistake, because about “90 percent of the warming of the planet is absorbed in heating the oceans.” Accordingly, there has not really been a pause, but only – in Joe Romm’s phrase, a faux pause. All that has happened is that a higher percentage of the warming than previously went into the deep ocean, evidently because of changes in the trade winds.
Global Warming’s Evil Twin
About half of the human-caused CO2 produced since the beginning of the industrial age has been absorbed by the ocean, and this absorption has resulted in ocean acidification, which Jane Lubchenco - who headed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) - called global warming’s “equally evil twin.”
Ocean acidification results from the fact that about 30 percent of our CO2 emissions have been absorbed by the ocean. This absorption keeps down the warming of the atmosphere that would otherwise be produced by these emissions. But this absorption also reduces the ocean’s PH level, thereby making the water more acidic. Tests have shown that since the industrial revolution, there has been a 30% increase in the ocean’s acidity. This acidity increases when CO2 mixes with water, resulting in carbonic acid. Just as carbonic acid eats out limestone caves, it does the same for animals with chalky skeletons, which make up a big percentage of sea life. Elevating the percentage of carbonic acid makes it increasingly difficult for these organisms - such as plankton, corals, crabs, clams, mussels, oysters, and snails - to calcify to make their skeletons.
The planet’s CO2 is now slightly above 400 ppm. If it reaches roughly 500 ppm, says one expert, “you put calcification out of business in the oceans.” If this happens, phytoplankton and corals will die, which will mean the death of all sea animals, from plankton to fish to whales. And this will greatly increase the food problem, because the ocean serves as the primary source of food for 3.5 billion people.
Part III
Climate Emergency
Once it is seen that the recent temperature increase is not due to natural variability, but instead to the increase in greenhouse gases, it is obvious that climate change is dangerous, not only because of the risk of seafood extinction and runaway global warming, which is likely to occur if global warming continues, but also because of various features of climate change, such as sea-level rise.
While admitting that the sea level had been rising, Legge said that “in the last few years [it] appears to be falling or at least to have leveled off.”
However, if the percentage of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to rise, the sea level, which rose about 8 inches (20 centimeters) in the 20th century, will rise much faster in our century. Until recently, IPCC scientists expected it to rise 3 feet (roughly 1 meter) by 2100, with some scientists predicting more like 6 to 7 feet (2 meters). But in 2015, leading climate scientist James Hansen and 16 fellow scientists released a new study saying that, if fossil fuels are not radically curtailed, the ocean could rise 10 feet (about 3 meters) before the end of the century.
The sea has already risen enough to force people - such as those in Bangladesh, the Sundarbans, and the Carteret islands – to move, because their lands flooded or at least became too salty to farm. Also, the same fate threatens the coastal areas of many countries, including Australia, China, Japan, and the United States. “If you live in South Florida and you’re not building a boat,” said a geology professor in Florida, “you’re not facing reality.”
In addition, although sea-level rise may be the most obvious danger created by global warming-caused climate change, there are dangers in every feature of climate change – as I have documented in the first part of my Unprecedented:
Contrary to Legge’s supposition, therefore, we do have a climate emergency.
The website for Skeptical Science - which advocates “getting skeptical about global warming skepticism” – has rebutted (under “Arguments”) over 175 denialist claims, beginning with the most popular ones, such as “climate’s changed before,” “it’s the sun,” “it’s not bad,” and “there is no consensus.” In most cases, these claims can quickly be seen to be false with only a little study, so people who support them are either deceivers or deceived.
The deceivers are the fossil-fuel companies, along with their hirelings, who make these claims while knowing them to be false. As pointed out above, the oil companies have known this since 1995, just as tobacco companies have known cigarettes to be carcinogenic since 1965.
The deceived are those who believe these claims while being unaware, as journalist Mark Hertsgaard said, “that they are mouthing talking points originally developed by big money interests.”
Many climate deniers identify with the Tea Party, which was originally portrayed in the press as if it were a spontaneous grassroots movement. In reality, however, it is an example of astroturfing, in which seemingly grassroots campaigns have been manufactured to mask the sponsor’s identity. In this case, the Tea Party was created by the Koch brothers (whose father had been one of the founders of the John Birch Society), especially by David Koch through his organization, Americans for Prosperity. Although Americans for Prosperity claimed to be a grassroots organization, and although David Koch tried to deny responsibility for it, the evidence shows it to be largely his creation - as indicated by the title of Jean Mayer’s New Yorker article “Covert Operations,” along with the title of a New York Magazine article, “The Billionaire’s Party.”
The covert operations of this billionaire’s party are carried out only on behalf of causes that support Koch interests, which generally are not the interests of the members of the Tea Party. Frank Rich wrote:
“When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket . . . , his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes.”
Although the Kochs call themselves libertarians, they are “libertarians who hate the free market” (as pointed out by an article discussing the Koch brothers as “America’s Greediest”).
In an essay entitled “The Tea Party Movement: Deluded and Inspired by Billionaires,” George Monbiot said that the Tea Party is “mostly composed of passionate, well-meaning people who think they are fighting elite power, unaware that they have been organised by the very interests they believe they are confronting.”
Likewise, Frank Rich wrote that the agendas of the Kochs often run counter to “the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News,” after which Rich added: “The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests.” And the Koch brothers do, incidentally, keep going to the bank: From 2010 to 2013, as mentioned earlier, they raised the value of their company from $35 billion to $68 billion.
Conclusion
I wrote this article because members of the 9/11 Truth Movement should not let themselves be deceived by the fossil-fuel corporations and the front-organizations they have created. Holding that the Bush-Cheney administration gave the public a completely unscientific account of what happened on 9/11, the members of this movement should not accept the completely anti-scientific denial of global warming and climate change. Seeing the official story of 9/11 as a self-serving lie sold by Big Government, the members of the 9/11 Truth Movement should not fall for the self-serving lie told by Big Money.
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. by Michael C. Ruppert
It is, of course, not just 9/11; false flags and labeling non-consensus opinions as conspiracy theories have been government practice for centuries:
10 More Crazy Conspiracy Theories That Became Conspiracy Facts. Jake Anderson, Anti-Media. May 19, 2017.
Generally speaking, conspiracy theories form where there is a vacuum of verifiable facts associated with a controversial, usually tragic event. The concept has evolved over the years and is a part of our popular culture. There are legions of conspiracy theorists and “truthers” who have devoted their lives to certain theories, and there are legions of skeptics who have devoted their lives to debunking those theories. All the while, conspiracy theories of every stripe and variety festoon the footnotes of history. Even the origin of the phrase itself is subject to conspiracy theory, as some researchers have argued that the CIA invented and promulgated the term in order to marginalize fringe thinkers and neutralize investigations.
The internet has obviously had a profound effect on conspiracy theories, simultaneously helping and hurting the cause. While a world of information is at people’s fingertips, so too are alternate worlds of manufactured propaganda. While the Internet may appear to be a democratized, unfiltered path toward facts and truth, it is easily manipulated. Powerful corporations pay a lot of money to have their dirty laundry buried in the search results underneath contrived puff pieces.With nearly the entire mainstream media apparatus at their disposal, the government is a maestro at this practice. As we learned from so-called Operation Mockingbird — a conspiracy theory fact discussed in my first post on the subject, “Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out to Be True,” — hundreds, if not thousands of news organizations have been conscripted into working with the CIA to support pro-government narratives. That was in the 1960s. One can only imagine how vast the network is now. Not to mention the fact that a single proprietary algorithm owned by Google dictates the vast majority of the population’s exposure to a subject.
In Part 1, I noted that the list had been meticulously whittled down to focus only on conspiracies that have been irrefutably proven to be fact. There are hundreds of conspiracy theories I think are likely to be true that are not on this list because there simply isn’t enough hard evidence yet to confirm it 100%. I also aimed for a good mixture of old conspiracies and new conspiracies. With groups like Wikileaks and Anonymous out there, the last decade has witnessed a dam burst of new data and documents. Thanks to intrepid journalists, whistleblowers, hacktivists, and leakers, the human race continues to tear down the wall of lies erected by the corporatocracy.
Without further ado, let’s get to it….ten more conspiracy theories we can start calling conspiracy facts.
1. Operation Ajax, the CIA’s Iranian Coup
In Iran it was called 28 Mordad coup; the United Kingdom contributed under the name Operation Boot. However you refer to it, Operation Ajax was an Iranian coup that in 1953 deposed the democratically elected Muhammad Mossadeq and reinstalled the monarchical power of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The primary cause of the coup was Mossadeq’s attempt to nationalize the Iran’s oil fields, which threatened the oil profits of Britain’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company (AIOC). The U.S. — in addition to protecting its ally’s petroleum monopoly — viewed Mossadeq’s move as communist aggression and therefore helped plan the return to power of one the world’s more insidious dictators, the shah. Operation Ajax resulted almost directly in 1979 Iranian revolution that created an anti-West Islamic republic led by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Though it was long considered an open secret, the U.S. government kept the truth behind Operation Ajax concealed from the American people until very recently. The CIA declassified various documentson the 60th anniversary of the coup.
Because of the recent declassification, much information relevant to this CIA-sponsored coup is now available in the CIA’s archives.
In describing Operation Ajax, the CIA itself has become rather oddly self-reflective:
“The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in most of the Middle East. Operation Ajax taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants that the world’s most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies. That helped tilt the political balance in a vast region away from freedom and toward dictatorship.”
In a recent interview on Democracy Now, Bernie Sanders remarked to Amy Goodman that this seminal chapter in the history of U.S./Middle East relations is almost entirely ignored by mainstream media. “Have you seen many shows about that on NBC?” he asked the crowd.
2. “Nayirah,” the False Pretext for the first Gulf War
It’s now commonly believed that the second Iraq War was sold to the American people — and their congressional representatives — based on an elaborate web of lies and manipulated intelligence.
In Part 1, I noted that the list had been meticulously whittled down to focus only on conspiracies that have been irrefutably proven to be fact. There are hundreds of conspiracy theories I think are likely to be true that are not on this list because there simply isn’t enough hard evidence yet to confirm it 100%. I also aimed for a good mixture of old conspiracies and new conspiracies. With groups like Wikileaks and Anonymous out there, the last decade has witnessed a dam burst of new data and documents. Thanks to intrepid journalists, whistleblowers, hacktivists, and leakers, the human race continues to tear down the wall of lies erected by the corporatocracy.
Without further ado, let’s get to it….ten more conspiracy theories we can start calling conspiracy facts.
1. Operation Ajax, the CIA’s Iranian Coup
In Iran it was called 28 Mordad coup; the United Kingdom contributed under the name Operation Boot. However you refer to it, Operation Ajax was an Iranian coup that in 1953 deposed the democratically elected Muhammad Mossadeq and reinstalled the monarchical power of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The primary cause of the coup was Mossadeq’s attempt to nationalize the Iran’s oil fields, which threatened the oil profits of Britain’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company (AIOC). The U.S. — in addition to protecting its ally’s petroleum monopoly — viewed Mossadeq’s move as communist aggression and therefore helped plan the return to power of one the world’s more insidious dictators, the shah. Operation Ajax resulted almost directly in 1979 Iranian revolution that created an anti-West Islamic republic led by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Though it was long considered an open secret, the U.S. government kept the truth behind Operation Ajax concealed from the American people until very recently. The CIA declassified various documentson the 60th anniversary of the coup.
Because of the recent declassification, much information relevant to this CIA-sponsored coup is now available in the CIA’s archives.
In describing Operation Ajax, the CIA itself has become rather oddly self-reflective:
“The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in most of the Middle East. Operation Ajax taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants that the world’s most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies. That helped tilt the political balance in a vast region away from freedom and toward dictatorship.”
In a recent interview on Democracy Now, Bernie Sanders remarked to Amy Goodman that this seminal chapter in the history of U.S./Middle East relations is almost entirely ignored by mainstream media. “Have you seen many shows about that on NBC?” he asked the crowd.
2. “Nayirah,” the False Pretext for the first Gulf War
It’s now commonly believed that the second Iraq War was sold to the American people — and their congressional representatives — based on an elaborate web of lies and manipulated intelligence.
What is less commonly known is that the first Iraq War came about in a very similar fashion. While, surprisingly, there is broad agreement that “Operation Desert Storm” was a worthwhile war, many people overlook the role of a fifteen-year-old girl named “Nayirah,” whose 1990 testimony to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus is credited with cementing the idea of Iraqi war crimes in the American popular consciousness. Nayirah testified to having witnessed Iraqi troops tearing babies from their incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and leaving them to die on the floor. It’s a profoundly disturbing image….and one that was entirely fictitious.
After a lengthy investigation, Amnesty International and other independent watchdog groups discovered that the situation described by Nayirah was fabricated by a PR firm named Hill & Knowlton (the largest in the world at this time), which was hired by the group Citizens for a Free Kuwait in order to create propaganda that would galvanize pro-war sentiment. The man overseeing the campaign was Bush political confidante Craig Fuller. This was a massive project utilizing 119 H&K executives in 12 offices across the United States and even involved casting Nayirah, who turned out to be Nayirah al-Sabah, daughter of Saud bin Nasir Al-Sabah, Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The Justice Department, which could have investigated the entire effort under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, turned a blind eye, allowing the Bush administration to pull off a massive “Wag the Dog”-style ideological false flag. Others call it “atrocity propaganda,” a form of psyop (psychological operation).
The “Nayirah” story is just another example of the government falsifying a narrative in order to manipulate the public into supporting war. This kind of psychological propaganda continued all through the second Iraq War and the War on Terror. Just recently, it was revealed that the Pentagon paid PR firm Bell Pottinger $540 million to create fake terrorist videos in Iraq.
3. Operation Paperclip
Originally called Operation Overcast, Operation Paperclip was the codename of the secret American plan to conscript Nazi scientists into U.S. intelligence services at the end of World War II. This ushered in and shielded about 1,500 Germans, including some engineers and technicians. Ostensibly, the purpose of this redeployment by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) was to prevent Nazi scientific intelligence from helping reconstitute a new German government; it was also a tactic meant to ensure the Soviet Union didn’t acquire any new technology.
Whatever strategic mindset might have lived inside Operation Paperclip, at its core, the project gave American identities to some of the most ruthless war criminals the world has ever seen.
According to Ynet, the new Nazi CIA scientists helped develop chemical weapons for the U.S. and worked alongside American scientists to develop LSD, which the CIA viewed as a ‘truth serum.’
4. Operation Gladio: Anti-Communist False Flags in Italy
Operation Gladio was the post-World War II love-child of a CIA/NATO/M16 plot to battle communism in Italy. The operation lasted two decades and used CIA-created “stay behind” networks as part of a “Strategy of Tension” that coordinated multiple terrorist attacks from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Authorities blamed these attacks on Marxists and other left-wing political opponents in order to stigmatize and condemn communism. The operation involved multiple bombings that killed hundreds of innocent people, including children. The most notable attack was the August 2, 1980, bombing of the Bologna train station, which killed 85 people.
In an Anti-Media piece written about five confirmed false flag operations (which includes Operation Gladio, I wrote:
“How do we know about Operation Gladio in spite of its incredibly clandestine nature? There are two principle sources. One, the investigations of Italian judge Felice Casson, whose presentation was so compelling it forced Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti to confirm Gladio’s existence. The second source is testimony from an actual Gladio operative, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, who is serving a life sentence for murder. In a 1990 interview with the Guardian, Vincenzo stated that Gladio was designed to psychologically coerce the Italian public to rely on the state for security.”
Operation Gladio is a textbook modern “false flag.” It used terror and violence to discredit an ideology (communism). And to think, this came at a time before the internet when the CIA didn’t have a fully entrenched mainstream media to trumpet, echo, and build consensus around every little nuance (though they were working on it with COINTELPRO and Operation Mockingbird). Nowadays, the CIA has multinational propaganda machines — the news networks — to make sure all terrorist attacks fit into the carefully scripted narrative that manufactures consent around our wars for oil, natural gas, and other resources.
5. Government uses insect and rodent drones to spy
It’s somewhat of a cliche to jokingly refer to a surrounding insect or bird as a clandestine spy deployed by the government to watch you. While we lack certain specifics on the ubiquity of the technology, we know definitively that the government has the technology to surveil citizens using insects and other small animals, and they use this technology in military applications.
There is some evidence to suggest that insect drones are used domestically to spy on citizens. In 2007, this theory conspiracy theory took shape when anti-war protesters reported strange buzzing insects. Written off as tin foil material, officials dismissed the suggestion that the government used insect drones to spy. Multiple witnesses reported erratic dragonfly-type objects hovering in the sky. The very next year, the U.S. Air Force announced their intended use of insect-sized spies ‘as tiny as bumblebees’ to infiltrate buildings in order to ‘photograph, record, and even attack insurgents and terrorists.‘ The government has come clean about its use of drones to spy on American citizens, so it’s difficult to believe they wouldn’t have at least tried insect drones.
While we can’t say with 100% certainty that there are insect drones spying on American citizens, though it’s exceedingly likely, what is irrefutable is the use of micro air vehicles (MAVs) and “spy animals” as war-time tools. DARPA launched its Stealthy Insect Sensor Project in 1999 as an effort to deputize bees as bomb locators in war zones. This was just the first phase in an ongoing project. In her book The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency, journalist Annie Jacobsen revealed that the agency’s near-future trajectory is to introduce “biohybrids” — part animal, part machine cyborgs — into the United States’ military arsenal.
In an interview with Coast to Coast AM, Jacobsen said:
“DARPA has already succeeded in creating a rat that will be steered by remote control by implanting an electrode in its brain.
“And it’s done the same thing with a moth which is really remarkable because the scientists implanted the electrodes in the pupa stage of the moth when it was still a worm! And then it transformed into having wings, and those tiny little micro-sensors transformed with the moth and the DARPA scientists were able to steer that moth.”
6. CIA assassinations and coups in foreign countries
When operatives for the Democratic Party claim the 2016 United States presidential election was tampered with by a foreign entity, it’s hard not to cringe at the irony. Firstly, they’ve presented no evidence, except to claim that government intelligence agencies believe it to be true. Sorry, that’s not actually evidence. That’s like the police saying they have DNA evidence but never actually scientifically presenting it in court. It’s kind of unnerving that we even have to point that out. Secondly, our own government and intelligence agencies, namely the CIA, have actively and aggressively subverted countless foreign elections over the last century and, in some cases, have outright funded the assassinations of candidates.
This subject could easily fill a multi-volume book, and countless authors have worked over the years to uncover the role of the CIA in foreign coups. Using every tool in their arsenal — including white, grey, and black psychological operations, counterinsurgencies, and brutal coups aimed at repressing and destroying radically democratic candidates — the CIA has subverted the “will of the people” across the world.
The most commonly noted instances of the CIA meddling in foreign elections and governments include the following: South Korea (late-1940s); Italy (1948-mid-1970s); Guatemala (1954); Congo (1960), Dominican Republic (1961), South Vietnam (1963), Brazil (1964); Uruguay (1969); Bolivia (1971); Chile(1970-1973); Argentina (1976); Australia (1975); El Salvador (1980); Iran (late-1970s); Grenada (1983) Haiti (1986); Panama (1990) Nicaragua (1990); Czechoslovakia (1990); Peru (1990-2000) Yugoslavia (2000). This is but a small sampling of countries where even mainstream news outlets and, in many cases, the CIA itself, admits calamitous U.S. involvement. There are literally dozens more and, of course, this is restricting the conversation to soft coups — otherwise, we could certainly include the complete military decimation of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and other Middle Eastern countries during the War on Terror, as well as the myriad imperial wars against perceived communist threats.
‘A foreign government hacked and subverted our election!’
The irony is thick with this one. Payback’s a bitch…..which, of course, isn’t giving our intelligence agencies, who have proven themselves to be pathological liars, the benefit of the doubt regarding their claims of Russian collusion during the 2016 presidential election. It’s just to kind of say…..you reap the harvest you have sown. When you look at the track record of the United States government, it’s a wonder the average citizen is safe traveling abroad.
7. Mainstream media is the propaganda branch of the State Department
People have long accused the media of being a proxy branch of the State Department, a highly sophisticated and well-produced form of manufactured consensus and controlled opposition all rolled into one. In ostensibly democratic nations, a free and independent press is of paramount importance. But in the U.S., we find a cohesion of the state and corporate news networks that do not constitute ‘state-run media’ in the traditional sense — but it’s close.
Our first solid documentation that the media is an echo chamber for the government came with the disclosure of what has come to be called Operation Mockingbird. This nefarious and far-reaching conspiracy was documented in Part 1 and involved the CIA essentially conscripting journalists, American news agencies, and major broadcasters to become domestic propagandists and spies. Eventually, this CIA/media symbiosis included journalists from all the top news organizations. Literally, thousands of people were involved.
This infiltration of the American media and press took place during the 1950s, at the start of the Cold War, and was carried out under the auspices of fighting communism. The CIA began to restrict its use of journalists in the Operation Mockingbird program in 1976, but many people believe it has since transmogrified into something far more powerful, nefarious, and ubiquitous today. We’re still in the early stages of proving to the masses that mainstream media is little more than a mouthpiece and propaganda machine for the government and its various agencies, but the evidence is accumulating.
During the 2016 presidential election, Wikileaks exposed a number of disturbing revelations showing collusion between the media and political operatives. This included collusion between the media, the Democratic National Committee, and the Hillary Clinton campaign. But it wasn’t just about swaying the election. New revelations showed that the government actively infiltrates powerful media corporations in order to shape their content and narratives. One of the best examples of this was the State Department’s role in affecting a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Julian Assange.
A more comprehensive list of examples of the Orwellian symbiotic relationship between the press and the government can be found here.
Perhaps the most disturbing recent addition to this chapter was the “Countering Disinformation Act” that President Obama slipped into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Christmas Eve of last year. In the context of the still-festering narrative of foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election, the act’s putative goal was to fight “fake news,” which many believe is actually a campaign to silence and dismantle alternative media on the Internet.
In order to accomplish this, the government is establishing a Global Engagement Center for managing disinformation and propaganda. Since we already know our government routinely performs psychological operations (psyops, or as they’ve been recently rebranded, Military Information Support Operations [MISO]), it should come as no surprise that manipulating the civilian population is a permanent goal. In fact, in the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, the government formally legalized the use of psyops on U.S. citizens. So how does this Global Engagement Center factor in?
The new law states:
“The Center is authorized to provide grants or contracts of financial support to civil society groups, media content providers, nongovernmental organizations, federally funded research and development centers, private companies, or academic institutions for the following purposes:
8. The Deep State (or the conspiracy theory formerly known as The New World Order)
I describe the Deep State in depth in an article entitled “Forget the New World Order — Here’s Who Really Runs the World.” In it I wrote:
“For decades, extreme ideologies on both the left and the right have clashed over the conspiratorial concept of a shadowy secret government often called the New World Order pulling the strings on the world’s heads of state and captains of industry.
“The phrase New World Order is largely derided as a sophomoric conspiracy theory entertained by minds that lack the sophistication necessary to understand the nuances of geopolitics. But it turns out the core idea — one of deep and overarching collusion between Wall Street and government with a globalist agenda — is operational in what a number of insiders call the “Deep State.”
In the wake of the 2016 election, the concept of the Deep State has grown into somewhat of a common phrase in the lexicon of alternative media theorists, crossing political boundaries and resonating across the ideological spectrum. Everyone from alt-left socialists to alt-righters now agrees there is an unelected cabal of elite neo-conservative corporatists and crony lawmakers running the geopolitical show.
Because it’s such a complex subject and permeates so many different academic, economic, and state apparatuses, it’s virtually impossible to issue a single, simple definition of the Deep State. If I were to hazard one, I would call it “the nexus of Wall Street and the national security state — a relationship where elected and unelected figures join forces to consolidate power and serve vested interests.” But even that is vague. We could also call it “the failure of our visible constitutional government and the cross-fertilization of corporatism with the globalist war on terror.”
Former Republican congressional aide Mike Lofgren gets more specific with who is involved:
“It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street.”
In his writing, Lofgren emphasized the role of FISA international surveillance courts. This was confirmed in a very interesting way when President Donald Trump accused former President Obama of tapping his phones, a charge Obama aides deflected by saying that if such a warrant had been issued, it would have been done through a FISA court. This shows how presidents are able to skirt the constitution by outsourcing surveillance requests. It also shows the interconnectedness of these agencies.
However you want to describe it, it’s the natural conclusion of Operation Mockingbird and most certainly a reality that the elites would have rather kept under the radar. Fortunately for the people of the Earth, revelations from Wikileaks and other whistleblowers have, over the last couple decades, made it abundantly clear that the Deep State (the New World Order) not only exists, but also that it’s far more sinister and powerful than early conspiracy theorists could have ever imagined.
9. CIA used psychics to infiltrate the Soviet Union during Cold War
It’s a plot in a science fiction movie or TV show we’ve all seen: a psychic being leveraged by a law enforcement agency to track down a criminal. The concept of a government psychic program was popularized by the film The Men Who Stare at Goats, which lampooned the mythical STARGATE program supposedly run by the CIA. Most people scoffed at the reality of this and considered it a wacky conspiracy theory, but a recently declassified trove of hundreds of thousands of CIA files finally confirmed not only that psychics are regularly used by police and other law enforcement agencies, but also that the government actually weaponized psychics during the Cold War to try to infiltrate the Soviet Union and gain information.
The documents, made publicly available thanks to the activist group Muckrock, confirm there were top-secret CIA and Defense Department programs to use remote viewing to infiltrate Soviet military installments. There were also programs developing ways to engage in “psychic warfare,” including the development of a “psychic shield” to block Soviet psychics.
10. CIA monitors U.S. citizens via their smart devices
Early in 2017, the organization Wikileaks began releasing their first post-2016 election cables with a series of explosive data dumps regarding the CIA’s cyber hacking abilities and exploits. It is called Vault 7. Updated serially in “Year Zero,” “Dark Matter,” “Marble,” “Grasshopper,” “HIVE,” “Weeping Angel,” and “Scribbles,” the documents show the unprecedented collection of cyber vulnerabilities, exploits, and hacking abilities consolidated within the agency that many believe constitute wide-ranging breaches of civil liberties.
Chief among these breaches is domestic surveillance and extrajudicial cyberhacking, which the Wikileaks documents confirm are taking place in an abundance of forms. The Vault 7 documents confirm that: The CIA can break into Android and iPhone handsets and all kinds of computers; the agency has the ability to hack into Apple iPhones and Android smartphones and actually assume full remote control of the device; the CIA can access consumer smart TVs to listen in on surrounding conversations; the agency looked into ways to hack into cars and crash them, allowing ‘nearly undetectable assassinations’ (an assertion that may be relevant to the Michael Hastings case); the CIA concealed vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers from other countries or governments.
This is just the beginning. Early in the release, Julian Assange said the documents released represented only a tiny fraction of the total data that was forthcoming. Wikileaks’ episodic data dumps on the CIA’s cyber hacking programs are nothing less than stunning. The establishment’s reaction to the ongoing releases verifies how big of a deal they are. One congressman went so far as to refer to Julian Assange and his whistleblowing outfit as a “foreign terrorist organization.” This isn’t new or unexpected, as the group’s slow but inexorable drips of revelations about government malfeasance continue to confound and disturb private citizens, consumer rights activists, tech companies, and international leaders alike.
Conclusion
Of course, not all conspiracy theories are true. In fact, there are hundreds, even thousands, that have been roundly debunked. Unfortunately, there are those who seek to lie and invent fictions for monetary gain and fame. Disinformation, propaganda, and dishonesty exist at all levels of society.
However, sometimes conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Therefore, it’s worth assessing them, even if their claims appear wholly outlandish. Especially if their claims appear wholly outlandish.
The conspiracy theory is a tool in a larger tool kit used by those who wish to decode the grossly imperfect and fluid narrative describing our world. When investigated responsibly, conspiracy theories function as part of a conceptual spectrum of analysis with which we can investigate government and corporate abuses of power and the manufacturing of ‘consensus reality.’ In the 21st century, when the very transmission of information can be considered criminal, being a responsible conspiracy theorist just means you practice due diligence and hunger for the truth.
After a lengthy investigation, Amnesty International and other independent watchdog groups discovered that the situation described by Nayirah was fabricated by a PR firm named Hill & Knowlton (the largest in the world at this time), which was hired by the group Citizens for a Free Kuwait in order to create propaganda that would galvanize pro-war sentiment. The man overseeing the campaign was Bush political confidante Craig Fuller. This was a massive project utilizing 119 H&K executives in 12 offices across the United States and even involved casting Nayirah, who turned out to be Nayirah al-Sabah, daughter of Saud bin Nasir Al-Sabah, Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The Justice Department, which could have investigated the entire effort under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, turned a blind eye, allowing the Bush administration to pull off a massive “Wag the Dog”-style ideological false flag. Others call it “atrocity propaganda,” a form of psyop (psychological operation).
The “Nayirah” story is just another example of the government falsifying a narrative in order to manipulate the public into supporting war. This kind of psychological propaganda continued all through the second Iraq War and the War on Terror. Just recently, it was revealed that the Pentagon paid PR firm Bell Pottinger $540 million to create fake terrorist videos in Iraq.
3. Operation Paperclip
Originally called Operation Overcast, Operation Paperclip was the codename of the secret American plan to conscript Nazi scientists into U.S. intelligence services at the end of World War II. This ushered in and shielded about 1,500 Germans, including some engineers and technicians. Ostensibly, the purpose of this redeployment by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) was to prevent Nazi scientific intelligence from helping reconstitute a new German government; it was also a tactic meant to ensure the Soviet Union didn’t acquire any new technology.
Whatever strategic mindset might have lived inside Operation Paperclip, at its core, the project gave American identities to some of the most ruthless war criminals the world has ever seen.
According to Ynet, the new Nazi CIA scientists helped develop chemical weapons for the U.S. and worked alongside American scientists to develop LSD, which the CIA viewed as a ‘truth serum.’
4. Operation Gladio: Anti-Communist False Flags in Italy
Operation Gladio was the post-World War II love-child of a CIA/NATO/M16 plot to battle communism in Italy. The operation lasted two decades and used CIA-created “stay behind” networks as part of a “Strategy of Tension” that coordinated multiple terrorist attacks from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Authorities blamed these attacks on Marxists and other left-wing political opponents in order to stigmatize and condemn communism. The operation involved multiple bombings that killed hundreds of innocent people, including children. The most notable attack was the August 2, 1980, bombing of the Bologna train station, which killed 85 people.
In an Anti-Media piece written about five confirmed false flag operations (which includes Operation Gladio, I wrote:
“How do we know about Operation Gladio in spite of its incredibly clandestine nature? There are two principle sources. One, the investigations of Italian judge Felice Casson, whose presentation was so compelling it forced Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti to confirm Gladio’s existence. The second source is testimony from an actual Gladio operative, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, who is serving a life sentence for murder. In a 1990 interview with the Guardian, Vincenzo stated that Gladio was designed to psychologically coerce the Italian public to rely on the state for security.”
Operation Gladio is a textbook modern “false flag.” It used terror and violence to discredit an ideology (communism). And to think, this came at a time before the internet when the CIA didn’t have a fully entrenched mainstream media to trumpet, echo, and build consensus around every little nuance (though they were working on it with COINTELPRO and Operation Mockingbird). Nowadays, the CIA has multinational propaganda machines — the news networks — to make sure all terrorist attacks fit into the carefully scripted narrative that manufactures consent around our wars for oil, natural gas, and other resources.
5. Government uses insect and rodent drones to spy
It’s somewhat of a cliche to jokingly refer to a surrounding insect or bird as a clandestine spy deployed by the government to watch you. While we lack certain specifics on the ubiquity of the technology, we know definitively that the government has the technology to surveil citizens using insects and other small animals, and they use this technology in military applications.
There is some evidence to suggest that insect drones are used domestically to spy on citizens. In 2007, this theory conspiracy theory took shape when anti-war protesters reported strange buzzing insects. Written off as tin foil material, officials dismissed the suggestion that the government used insect drones to spy. Multiple witnesses reported erratic dragonfly-type objects hovering in the sky. The very next year, the U.S. Air Force announced their intended use of insect-sized spies ‘as tiny as bumblebees’ to infiltrate buildings in order to ‘photograph, record, and even attack insurgents and terrorists.‘ The government has come clean about its use of drones to spy on American citizens, so it’s difficult to believe they wouldn’t have at least tried insect drones.
While we can’t say with 100% certainty that there are insect drones spying on American citizens, though it’s exceedingly likely, what is irrefutable is the use of micro air vehicles (MAVs) and “spy animals” as war-time tools. DARPA launched its Stealthy Insect Sensor Project in 1999 as an effort to deputize bees as bomb locators in war zones. This was just the first phase in an ongoing project. In her book The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency, journalist Annie Jacobsen revealed that the agency’s near-future trajectory is to introduce “biohybrids” — part animal, part machine cyborgs — into the United States’ military arsenal.
In an interview with Coast to Coast AM, Jacobsen said:
“DARPA has already succeeded in creating a rat that will be steered by remote control by implanting an electrode in its brain.
“And it’s done the same thing with a moth which is really remarkable because the scientists implanted the electrodes in the pupa stage of the moth when it was still a worm! And then it transformed into having wings, and those tiny little micro-sensors transformed with the moth and the DARPA scientists were able to steer that moth.”
6. CIA assassinations and coups in foreign countries
When operatives for the Democratic Party claim the 2016 United States presidential election was tampered with by a foreign entity, it’s hard not to cringe at the irony. Firstly, they’ve presented no evidence, except to claim that government intelligence agencies believe it to be true. Sorry, that’s not actually evidence. That’s like the police saying they have DNA evidence but never actually scientifically presenting it in court. It’s kind of unnerving that we even have to point that out. Secondly, our own government and intelligence agencies, namely the CIA, have actively and aggressively subverted countless foreign elections over the last century and, in some cases, have outright funded the assassinations of candidates.
This subject could easily fill a multi-volume book, and countless authors have worked over the years to uncover the role of the CIA in foreign coups. Using every tool in their arsenal — including white, grey, and black psychological operations, counterinsurgencies, and brutal coups aimed at repressing and destroying radically democratic candidates — the CIA has subverted the “will of the people” across the world.
The most commonly noted instances of the CIA meddling in foreign elections and governments include the following: South Korea (late-1940s); Italy (1948-mid-1970s); Guatemala (1954); Congo (1960), Dominican Republic (1961), South Vietnam (1963), Brazil (1964); Uruguay (1969); Bolivia (1971); Chile(1970-1973); Argentina (1976); Australia (1975); El Salvador (1980); Iran (late-1970s); Grenada (1983) Haiti (1986); Panama (1990) Nicaragua (1990); Czechoslovakia (1990); Peru (1990-2000) Yugoslavia (2000). This is but a small sampling of countries where even mainstream news outlets and, in many cases, the CIA itself, admits calamitous U.S. involvement. There are literally dozens more and, of course, this is restricting the conversation to soft coups — otherwise, we could certainly include the complete military decimation of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and other Middle Eastern countries during the War on Terror, as well as the myriad imperial wars against perceived communist threats.
‘A foreign government hacked and subverted our election!’
The irony is thick with this one. Payback’s a bitch…..which, of course, isn’t giving our intelligence agencies, who have proven themselves to be pathological liars, the benefit of the doubt regarding their claims of Russian collusion during the 2016 presidential election. It’s just to kind of say…..you reap the harvest you have sown. When you look at the track record of the United States government, it’s a wonder the average citizen is safe traveling abroad.
7. Mainstream media is the propaganda branch of the State Department
People have long accused the media of being a proxy branch of the State Department, a highly sophisticated and well-produced form of manufactured consensus and controlled opposition all rolled into one. In ostensibly democratic nations, a free and independent press is of paramount importance. But in the U.S., we find a cohesion of the state and corporate news networks that do not constitute ‘state-run media’ in the traditional sense — but it’s close.
Our first solid documentation that the media is an echo chamber for the government came with the disclosure of what has come to be called Operation Mockingbird. This nefarious and far-reaching conspiracy was documented in Part 1 and involved the CIA essentially conscripting journalists, American news agencies, and major broadcasters to become domestic propagandists and spies. Eventually, this CIA/media symbiosis included journalists from all the top news organizations. Literally, thousands of people were involved.
This infiltration of the American media and press took place during the 1950s, at the start of the Cold War, and was carried out under the auspices of fighting communism. The CIA began to restrict its use of journalists in the Operation Mockingbird program in 1976, but many people believe it has since transmogrified into something far more powerful, nefarious, and ubiquitous today. We’re still in the early stages of proving to the masses that mainstream media is little more than a mouthpiece and propaganda machine for the government and its various agencies, but the evidence is accumulating.
During the 2016 presidential election, Wikileaks exposed a number of disturbing revelations showing collusion between the media and political operatives. This included collusion between the media, the Democratic National Committee, and the Hillary Clinton campaign. But it wasn’t just about swaying the election. New revelations showed that the government actively infiltrates powerful media corporations in order to shape their content and narratives. One of the best examples of this was the State Department’s role in affecting a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Julian Assange.
A more comprehensive list of examples of the Orwellian symbiotic relationship between the press and the government can be found here.
Perhaps the most disturbing recent addition to this chapter was the “Countering Disinformation Act” that President Obama slipped into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Christmas Eve of last year. In the context of the still-festering narrative of foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election, the act’s putative goal was to fight “fake news,” which many believe is actually a campaign to silence and dismantle alternative media on the Internet.
In order to accomplish this, the government is establishing a Global Engagement Center for managing disinformation and propaganda. Since we already know our government routinely performs psychological operations (psyops, or as they’ve been recently rebranded, Military Information Support Operations [MISO]), it should come as no surprise that manipulating the civilian population is a permanent goal. In fact, in the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, the government formally legalized the use of psyops on U.S. citizens. So how does this Global Engagement Center factor in?
The new law states:
“The Center is authorized to provide grants or contracts of financial support to civil society groups, media content providers, nongovernmental organizations, federally funded research and development centers, private companies, or academic institutions for the following purposes:
- To support local independent media who are best placed to refute foreign disinformation and manipulation in their own communities.
- To collect and store examples in print, online, and social media, disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda directed at the United States and its allies and partners.
- To analyze and report on tactics, techniques, and procedures of foreign information warfare with respect to disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda.
- To support efforts by the Center to counter efforts by foreign entities to use disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda to influence the policies and social and political stability of the United States and United States allies and partner nations.”
8. The Deep State (or the conspiracy theory formerly known as The New World Order)
I describe the Deep State in depth in an article entitled “Forget the New World Order — Here’s Who Really Runs the World.” In it I wrote:
“For decades, extreme ideologies on both the left and the right have clashed over the conspiratorial concept of a shadowy secret government often called the New World Order pulling the strings on the world’s heads of state and captains of industry.
“The phrase New World Order is largely derided as a sophomoric conspiracy theory entertained by minds that lack the sophistication necessary to understand the nuances of geopolitics. But it turns out the core idea — one of deep and overarching collusion between Wall Street and government with a globalist agenda — is operational in what a number of insiders call the “Deep State.”
In the wake of the 2016 election, the concept of the Deep State has grown into somewhat of a common phrase in the lexicon of alternative media theorists, crossing political boundaries and resonating across the ideological spectrum. Everyone from alt-left socialists to alt-righters now agrees there is an unelected cabal of elite neo-conservative corporatists and crony lawmakers running the geopolitical show.
Because it’s such a complex subject and permeates so many different academic, economic, and state apparatuses, it’s virtually impossible to issue a single, simple definition of the Deep State. If I were to hazard one, I would call it “the nexus of Wall Street and the national security state — a relationship where elected and unelected figures join forces to consolidate power and serve vested interests.” But even that is vague. We could also call it “the failure of our visible constitutional government and the cross-fertilization of corporatism with the globalist war on terror.”
Former Republican congressional aide Mike Lofgren gets more specific with who is involved:
“It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street.”
In his writing, Lofgren emphasized the role of FISA international surveillance courts. This was confirmed in a very interesting way when President Donald Trump accused former President Obama of tapping his phones, a charge Obama aides deflected by saying that if such a warrant had been issued, it would have been done through a FISA court. This shows how presidents are able to skirt the constitution by outsourcing surveillance requests. It also shows the interconnectedness of these agencies.
However you want to describe it, it’s the natural conclusion of Operation Mockingbird and most certainly a reality that the elites would have rather kept under the radar. Fortunately for the people of the Earth, revelations from Wikileaks and other whistleblowers have, over the last couple decades, made it abundantly clear that the Deep State (the New World Order) not only exists, but also that it’s far more sinister and powerful than early conspiracy theorists could have ever imagined.
9. CIA used psychics to infiltrate the Soviet Union during Cold War
It’s a plot in a science fiction movie or TV show we’ve all seen: a psychic being leveraged by a law enforcement agency to track down a criminal. The concept of a government psychic program was popularized by the film The Men Who Stare at Goats, which lampooned the mythical STARGATE program supposedly run by the CIA. Most people scoffed at the reality of this and considered it a wacky conspiracy theory, but a recently declassified trove of hundreds of thousands of CIA files finally confirmed not only that psychics are regularly used by police and other law enforcement agencies, but also that the government actually weaponized psychics during the Cold War to try to infiltrate the Soviet Union and gain information.
The documents, made publicly available thanks to the activist group Muckrock, confirm there were top-secret CIA and Defense Department programs to use remote viewing to infiltrate Soviet military installments. There were also programs developing ways to engage in “psychic warfare,” including the development of a “psychic shield” to block Soviet psychics.
10. CIA monitors U.S. citizens via their smart devices
Early in 2017, the organization Wikileaks began releasing their first post-2016 election cables with a series of explosive data dumps regarding the CIA’s cyber hacking abilities and exploits. It is called Vault 7. Updated serially in “Year Zero,” “Dark Matter,” “Marble,” “Grasshopper,” “HIVE,” “Weeping Angel,” and “Scribbles,” the documents show the unprecedented collection of cyber vulnerabilities, exploits, and hacking abilities consolidated within the agency that many believe constitute wide-ranging breaches of civil liberties.
Chief among these breaches is domestic surveillance and extrajudicial cyberhacking, which the Wikileaks documents confirm are taking place in an abundance of forms. The Vault 7 documents confirm that: The CIA can break into Android and iPhone handsets and all kinds of computers; the agency has the ability to hack into Apple iPhones and Android smartphones and actually assume full remote control of the device; the CIA can access consumer smart TVs to listen in on surrounding conversations; the agency looked into ways to hack into cars and crash them, allowing ‘nearly undetectable assassinations’ (an assertion that may be relevant to the Michael Hastings case); the CIA concealed vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers from other countries or governments.
This is just the beginning. Early in the release, Julian Assange said the documents released represented only a tiny fraction of the total data that was forthcoming. Wikileaks’ episodic data dumps on the CIA’s cyber hacking programs are nothing less than stunning. The establishment’s reaction to the ongoing releases verifies how big of a deal they are. One congressman went so far as to refer to Julian Assange and his whistleblowing outfit as a “foreign terrorist organization.” This isn’t new or unexpected, as the group’s slow but inexorable drips of revelations about government malfeasance continue to confound and disturb private citizens, consumer rights activists, tech companies, and international leaders alike.
Conclusion
Of course, not all conspiracy theories are true. In fact, there are hundreds, even thousands, that have been roundly debunked. Unfortunately, there are those who seek to lie and invent fictions for monetary gain and fame. Disinformation, propaganda, and dishonesty exist at all levels of society.
However, sometimes conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Therefore, it’s worth assessing them, even if their claims appear wholly outlandish. Especially if their claims appear wholly outlandish.
The conspiracy theory is a tool in a larger tool kit used by those who wish to decode the grossly imperfect and fluid narrative describing our world. When investigated responsibly, conspiracy theories function as part of a conceptual spectrum of analysis with which we can investigate government and corporate abuses of power and the manufacturing of ‘consensus reality.’ In the 21st century, when the very transmission of information can be considered criminal, being a responsible conspiracy theorist just means you practice due diligence and hunger for the truth.
10 Conspiracy Theories That Turned out to Be True. Jake Anderson, Anti-Media. May 18, 2017.
Sometimes conspiracy theories become conspiracy facts.In recent years, the mere notion of conspiracy theories has increasingly been stigmatized and ridiculed by mainstream news outlets, internet trolls, and “rational” thinkers. Yet, with powerful revelations by Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks, and generations of intrepid journalists, we now know that many outlandish geopolitical and domestic “conspiracy theories” were and are cold-blooded truths of the modern world. Here are 10 that are well-documented and profoundly disturbing…
1) The Gulf of Tonkin Incident
The Gulf of Tonkin incident, a major escalator of US involvement in the Vietnam War, never actually occurred.
It’s true. The original incident – also sometimes referred to as the USS Maddox Incident(s) –involved the destroyer USS Maddox supposedly engaging three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats as part of an intelligence patrol. The Maddox fired almost 300 shells.
President Lyndon B. Johnson promptly drafted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which became his administration’s legal justification for military involvement in Vietnam. The problem is the event never happened.
In 2005, a declassified internal National Security Agency study revealed that there were NO North Vietnamese naval vessels present during the incident. So, what was the Maddox firing at? In 1965, President Johnson commented: “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”
Worth pointing out: The NSA’s own historian, Robert J. Hanyok, wrote a report stating that the agency had deliberately distorted intelligence reports in 1964. He concluded: “The parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq War make it all the more worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964.”
2) Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
Between 1932 and 1972, the US Public Health Service conducted a clinical study on rural African American men who had contracted syphilis. The Public Health Service never informed these men they had a sexually transmitted disease, nor did they offer treatment, even after penicillin became available as a cure in the 1940s.
Tragically, it’s true. Rather than receiving treatment, the subjects of these studies were told they had “bad blood.”
When World War II began, 250 of the men registered for the draft and were only then, for the first time, informed they had syphilis. Even then, the PHS denied them treatment.
By the early 1970s, 128 of the original 399 men had died of syphilis and syphilis-related complications, 40 of their wives had the disease and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis.
Worth pointing out: A similar experiment conducted on prisoners, soldiers, and patients of a mental hospital in Guatemala actually involved the PHS deliberately infecting the patients and then treating them with antibiotics.
3) Project MKUltra
The CIA ran secret mind control experiments on US citizens from the 1950s until 1973.
It’s so true that in 1995 President Clinton actually issued a formal apology on behalf of the US government.
Essentially, the CIA used drugs, electronics, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, verbal and sexual abuse, and torture to conduct experimental behavioral engineering experiments on subjects. The program subcontracted hundreds of these projects to over 80 different institutions, including universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies.
Most of this was uncovered in 1977 when a Freedom of Information Act exposed 20,000 previously classified documents and triggered a series of Senate hearings. Because CIA Director Richard Helms had most of the more damning MKULTRA files destroyed in 1973, much of what actually occurred during these experiments is still unknown and, of course, not a single person was brought to justice.
Worth pointing out: There is growing evidence that Theodore Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber, was a subject of the Project MKULTRA while he was at Harvard in the late 1950s.
4) Operation Northwoods
The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military drew up and approved plans to create acts of terrorism on US soil in order to sway the American public into supporting a war against Cuba.
It’s true and the documents are out there.
Fortunately, President Kennedy rejected the plan, which included: innocent Americans being shot dead on the streets; boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere; people being framed for bombings they did not commit; and planes being hijacked.
Additionally, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, planned to fabricate evidence that would implicate Fidel Castro and Cuban refugees as the perpetrators of the attacks.
Perhaps most horrifyingly, Lemnitzer planned for an elaborately staged incident whereby a Cuban aircraft would attack and shoot down a plane full of college students.
5) CIA Drug Trafficking
During the 1980s, the CIA facilitated the sale of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army.
It’s convoluted and complex, but it’s true.
Gary Webb’s book Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion outlines how CIA-backed Contras smuggled cocaine into the U.S. and then distributed crack to Los Angeles gangs, pocketing the profits. The CIA directly aided the drug dealers to raise money for the Contras.
“This drug network,” Webb wrote in a 1996 San Jose MercuryNews article, “opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the ‘crack’ capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America . . . and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.’s gangs to buy automatic weapons.”
Worth pointing out: On December 10, 2004, Webb committed suicide under suspicious circumstances, namely the fact that he used two bullets to shoot himself in the head.
6) Operation Mockingbird
In the late 1940s, as the Cold War was just getting underway, the CIA launched a top secret project called Operation Mockingbird. Their goal was to buy influence and control among the major media outlets. They also planned to put journalists and reporters directly on the CIA payroll, which some claim is ongoing to this day. The architects of this plan were Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post), who planned to enlist American news organizations and journalists to basically become spies and propagandists.
Their list of entrenched agents eventually included journalists from ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, and Copley News Service. By the 1950s, the CIA had infiltrated the nation’s businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives.
Fortunately, our media is no longer lured in by corporations and governments to disseminate propaganda and disinformation….hmmm, never mind–strike that last statement.
7) COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO was a series of clandestine, illegal FBI projects that infiltrated domestic political organizations to discredit and smear them. This included critics of the Vietnam War, civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King and a wide variety of activists and journalists.
The acts committed against them included psychological warfare, slander using forged documents and false reports in the media, harassment, wrongful imprisonment and, according to some, intimidation and possibly violence and assassination.
Similar and possibly more sophisticated tactics are still used today, including NSA monitoring (see #10).
8) Operation Snow White
Operation Snow White is the name given to an unprecedented infiltration of the US government by the Church of Scientology during the 1970s. They stole classified government files regarding Scientology from dozens of government agencies.
In 1977, the FBI finally cracked Snow White open which led to the arrest and imprisonment of a senior Church official.
The core mission of the program was to expose and legally expunge “all false and secret files of the nations of operating areas” and to enable Church seniors and L. Ron Hubbard himself to “frequent all Western nations without threat.” By the end, of course, there was nothing legal about their endeavours.
9) Secret Global Economic Policies
For years, activists who feared a sinister globalist corporatocracy were told they were being paranoid. Whether you want to call it the New World Order or not: they were right.
In 2013, WikiLeaks released the secretly negotiated draft text for the entire TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) Intellectual Property Rights Chapter. It revealed a closed-door regional free trade agreement being negotiated by countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says TPP has “extensive negative ramifications for users’ freedom of speech, right to privacy and due process, and [will] hinder peoples’ abilities to innovate.”
Worth pointing out: In June 2014, WikiLeaks revealed the even more far-reaching Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), a 50-country agreement that will promote unprecedented levels of privatization across the world. The agreement will essentially prevent governments from returning public services into public hands. This could dramatically affect our ability to enact environmental regulations and keep workers safe.
10) The US Government Illegally Spies On Its Own Citizens
This used to be laughed at as a dystopian fantasy derived from an overactive imagination, Orwell’s 1984, and a juvenile distrust of the government. When you claimed “they” were spying on you, people labeled you a paranoid conspiracy theorist, a tinfoil hat-wearing loon.
Even after it was revealed that the NSA has been illegally eavesdropping on us and collecting our cell phone metadata for over a decade, people still hedged on the meaning of it. Yes, they are analyzing our transmissions, but it’s under the auspices of national security. “In a post 9/11 world” certain liberties must be sacrificed for the sake of security, right?
It turns out that is patently untrue. Not only is there no evidence that the NSA has protected us from terrorism, there is growing evidence that it makes us more vulnerable. Thanks to revelations about the NSA and their Prism project, we know that the scope of the NSA’s eavesdropping is even beyond what we originally believed.
In early June of 2014, the Washington Post reported that almost 90% of the data being collected by NSA surveillance programs is from Internet users with no connection to terrorist activities. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, this is in clear violation of the constitution.
The ACLU is pursuing a lawsuit against the NSA, claiming that the dragnet-style mass collection of data violates the Fourth Amendment right of privacy as well as the First Amendment rights of free speech and association.
Never Forget: The US Government Has A Known History Of Using False Flags. Caitlin Johnstone, Medium. Sep. 10, 2017.
mainstream adherents like to pretend they’re confident that the official narrative is accurate, but they aren’t. A lot of hardcore conspiracy analysts like to pretend they know the real story, but they don’t. There’s simply not enough publicly available information for anyone to be certain exactly how things went down that day; all we can know for sure is that (A) the official story is riddled with plot holes, and (B) the American power establishment has an extensive and well-documented history of using false flags and propaganda to manipulate the public into supporting evil acts of military interventionism.
9/11 and Global Warming: Are They Both False Conspiracy Theories? David Ray Griffin, Information Clearinghouse. Sept. 11, 2015.
Some people have argued that global warming is a conspiratorial lie, deceiving the public for pernicious reasons. The most well known of these people is Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who in 2012 published a book entitled The Greatest Hoax, which warns people against “the global warming conspiracy.”
Some members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have endorsed this view. Believing that the Bush-Cheney administration conspired with others to claim falsely that America was attacked by Muslims on 9/11, they say that the government’s false conspiracy theory about 9/11 should make us suspicious that other governmental claims may also be conspiracies to mislead the public.
Suspicions about governmental conspiracies are not baseless. Claims that the U.S. government has given a false account of this or that event are, however, generally rejected by the press. Since the time of The Warren Commission Report, which did not quiet suspicions that the assassination of President Kennedy had been an inside job, beliefs about huge government crimes have been derided by the CIA and the press as “conspiracy theories” in the pejorative sense of the term. People who give voice to such beliefs are ridiculed as “conspiracy theorists,” a label that implies that the conspiracy claim is obviously false.
Nevertheless, as Lance deHaven-Smith has discussed in his 2013 book Conspiracy Theory in America, it is well known that the U.S. government has indeed orchestrated conspiracies with enormous consequences, such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the Iran-Contra affair, as well as, more recently, the claims that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks and was prepared to use weapons of mass destruction.
So if people, believing that there is good evidence that 9/11 was an inside job, are aware of the U.S. government’s involvement in these other conspiracies, there is no good reason to doubt that there are additional examples of conspiracies that have been engineered at the highest levels.
In particular, if it is assumed that 9/11 was indeed an inside job, would this assumption provide a good basis for suspecting that the theory of global warming has resulted from a deceitful conspiracy?
The phrase “theory of global warming” is used here as shorthand for a fourfold conviction:
- Increases of the percentage of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are raising the planet’s average temperature.
- The main cause of these increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases is the burning of fossil fuels.
- The global warming produced by these fossil-fuel emissions is starting to change the climate.
- This climate change, if it continues, will become increasingly destructive.
Because this fourfold conviction is held by virtually all climate scientists around the world, the theory of global warming can also be called “the position of climate science.” Individuals and organizations who dispute climate science in this sense are referred to as “climate-science deniers,” “climate-change deniers” or “global-warming deniers.” Often the term “denialism” is used for the active argument against climate science, with those engaged in this argument called “denialists.”
I ask the question about the relevance of 9/11 to climate science not only because many members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have supported global-warming denialism, but also because the success of this denialist movement has been disastrous.
As I have documented in a 2015 book, the denialist movement was formed and financed by the fossil-fuel industry, and the doubt it created has been used to delay legislation to restrict the use of fossil fuels – a delay that may result in the destruction of civilization. Climate deniers call this fear “alarmism.” But there are times when alarm is appropriate and, my book argues, this is the supreme example.
Believing that it is a shame that many members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have been misled into supporting self-interested propaganda by the fossil-fuel industries, I ask whether this movement’s basic conviction - that the official story about 9/11 is a lie - provides a basis for accepting climate-science denial.
The transition from the one to the other is typically made on the basis of two beliefs:
- Climate scientists’ claims about global warming are analogous to the government’s claims about 9/11.
- Just as evidence proves the falsity of the government’s 9/11 account, evidence shows the falsity of the idea that the burning of fossil fuels is threatening civilization by warming the planet.
The first two parts of this article looks at these two beliefs in order; the third part argues that we do indeed have a climate emergency.
Part I: Are 9/11 and Global Warming Analogous?
Because the claims about global warming are analogous to the government’s false claims about 9/11, some people believe, these claims are also probably false. But the Bush-Cheney administration’s claims about 9/11 are not at all analogous to the widely accepted views about global warming.
9/11, Global Warming, and Science
A well-known member of the 9/11 Truth Movement, who writes under the name “Victronix,” has argued that standard beliefs about 9/11 and global warming are not only very different, but also different in ways that prevent 9/11 beliefs from providing an analogy to scientists’ belief about global warming. The idea that global warming is a lie, she pointed out, implies that “the vast majority of the scientific community is working in collusion to create a worldwide hoax - including Russia and China and the entire industrialized world - that a worldwide environmental crisis is unfolding.” In other words, thousands of scientists from many countries around the world, including countries that are strongly opposed to each other, all agreed to tell a huge lie.
By contrast, she said, 9/11 involved “a single national government (and collusion by other intelligence and government leaders who also benefit) with highly limited and controlled science whose evidence is completely controlled, destroyed or hidden.” This “controlled science” is very different from the science supporting global warming belief: “Scientists all over the world can and are investigating and confirming the same findings over and over.” Unlike the purported events used to claim that Muslims attacked America on 9/11, the science of global warming is based on “ongoing events whose evidence is available to everyone all over the world to examine simultaneously using the scientific method and simple tools to measure and analyze.”
Making this point more succinctly, Australians Will Grant and Rod Lamberts wrote: “The idea of an international conspiracy across dozens of disciplines, hundreds of institutions and thousands of individuals is honestly laughable.”
The different relations to science can also be stated in another way: The theory of global warming is analogous not to the U.S. government’s account of the 9/11 attacks, but to the 9/11 Truth Movement’s rejection of the government’s account: Just as the 9/11 Truth Movement is supported by scientists from various fields, including physics and chemistry (as well as by students of architecture and engineering), the idea that fossil fuels are causing global warming and hence climate change is supported by most of the scientists who publish about climate change – indeed, at least 97.5% of them.
So this is the appropriate analogy: The 9/11 Truth Movement, which is supported by scientific evidence, is disputed by the U.S. government, which the 9/11 Truth Movement regards as behind the 9/11 attacks. And the theory of global warming, which is based on scientific evidence, is disputed by the fossil-fuel industries, which climate scientists see as primarily responsible for global warming.
So in each case, the views of independent scientists are disputed by huge enterprises, which clearly have self-interested reasons for challenging the scientific evidence.
Accordingly, the idea that 9/11 skepticism is similar to global warming skepticism has the relationship backwards. When it is claimed that “they” are deceiving the public about global warming, just as “they” deceived the public about the 9/11 attacks, it is necessary to determine the identity of the “they.” The best clue to the likely “they” in each case is to determine who would have benefitted from deception.
The 9/11 Truth Movement has considerable consensus on the question of who benefited from the official account of 9/11: The Bush-Cheney administration (which wanted Afghanistan’s minerals and natural gas and also planned to attack Iraq for its oil); the biggest U.S. oil companies (the CEOs of which were covertly members of Dick Cheney’s 2001 energy task force); Israel (as stated by the 9/11 Commission Report’s executive director, Philip Zelikow); the U.S. military (the budget of which went way up); and the U.S. intelligence agencies (whose budgets doubled after 9/11). But who are the “they” with regard to global warming?
Who Benefits from Climate Denial?
Victronix concluded her discussion of global warming by asking, “who benefits from the claims that human involvement is a hoax?” The answer to that question is, of course, fossil-fuel companies, which have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to promote denial of climate science.
For many years, the main promoter of climate-science denialism was ExxonMobil, the world’s most successful corporation, earning roughly $40 billion a year and paying its CEO over $30 million a year.
Besides giving millions of dollars to scientists, lobbyists, and politicians to promote climate denial, ExxonMobil gave at least $25 million since 1998 to support some 100 climate-denying front groups. ExxonMobil thereby created the impression that climate denial had arisen spontaneously from scientists, politicians, and ordinary citizens. According to a 2009 article by Raw Story, a “group promoting climate skepticism has extensive ties to Exxon-Mobil” (it was on a website responding to this article that Victronix posted her comments).
The group in question, which is named the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, published a report entitled Climate Science Reconsidered. Arguing that global warming is not human-caused, this report said: “Nature, not human activity, rules the planet.” In addition, reported the highly praised book Merchants of Doubt, the report said that global warming is “unequivocally good news,” because rising CO2 levels “increase plant growth and make plants more resistant to drought and pests.”
This denialist report was released and promoted by the Heartland Institute, which between 1998 and 2009 had received at least $676,500 from ExxonMobil. The lead author of this report was S. Fred Singer, who has had a notoriously bad scientific career, having previously been proven wrong in a series of issues in which he contested the scientific consensus. But his career path has been financially successful.
In 1998, Singer started an organization called the Science and Environmental Policy Project, in order to begin a book on global warming, and for which ExxonMobil gave him $20,000 between 1998 and 2000.
As Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway reported in Merchants of Doubt, Singer had previously helped the tobacco industry’s effort to avoid regulations about environmental smoke, also called secondhand smoke. Singer used this project to promote what he called “sound science” and to denounce “junk science,” by which he meant, specifically, the EPA’s 1992 report that secondhand smoke causes cancer. Singer also became an advisor to The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, which was funded by Philip Morris to attack the EPA’s report, even though Philip Morris and hence Singer knew that the EPA report - which was based on scientific studies from around the world - was sound, not junk, science.
Singer had earlier earned money by joining the efforts of industries that wanted to prevent legislation to reduce acid rain. By 1983, there was an overwhelming scientific consensus that acid rain was produced by the sulfur released during the burning of fossil fuels, and the United States and Canada were set to sign an agreement to reduce the emissions of sulfur. But the Reagan Administration, which strongly opposed any such legislation, appointed Singer to an acid-rain task force, for which he was allowed to write a separate appendix, claiming that the science was still uncertain. As a result, the United States did not sign the agreement with Canada, and sulfur dioxide levels did not begin declining until 1990 when legislation based on the scientific consensus was finally passed.
Singer also, while serving as the chief scientist for Reagan’s Department of Transportation, argued against the scientific consensus that a growing hole in the ozone layer was caused by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were used in spray cans, refrigerators, and air conditioners. The aerosol industry, seeking to prevent legislation, hired scientists to dispute the scientific consensus, and Singer joined in, arguing that an “ozone scare” had been created by “corrupt scientists.” The scientists who had shown that the CFCs in the stratosphere destroyed ozone won a Nobel Prize, so Singer attacked the Nobel committee! But eventually, Singer’s argument “was proved wrong, when CFCs were banned and the ozone hole began to repair itself.”
Nevertheless, after having been wrong time and time again, Singer was asked by the Heartland Institute to be the lead author of its report, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, which claims that the burning of fossil fuels is not creating dangerous global warming. Besides whatever money Singer made for writing this book, he has also served as a consultant by several other organizations funded by ExxonMobil, including Frontiers of Freedom (which ExxonMobil gave at least $1,272,000) and the National Center for Policy Analysis (which ExxonMobil gave $615,900).
Did Singer actually believe his arguments about secondhand smoke, acid rain, the ozone layer, and fossil fuels? This seems unlikely, especially given information learned from leaked documents. For example, by 1965, showed one document, tobacco industry scientists were “unanimous in their opinion that [tobacco] smoke is . . . carcinogenic.”
The same pattern appears to have occurred with regard to global warming. A document shows that in 1995, the oil industry’s own scientific advisors said: “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases is well established and cannot be denied.” Nevertheless, just as the cigarette companies continued to deny the existence of evidence showing that cigarettes cause cancer, ExxonMobil not only continued to deny that oil and gas emissions cause climate change but also paid tens of millions to hire others, such as Fred Singer, to support this denial.
In the meantime, Koch Industries, which is invested in various kinds of fossil fuels, including the Canadian tar sands, has begun providing even more financial support for global-warming denialism than ExxonMobil: Between 1997 and 2010, Koch Industries gave over $67 million for this purpose. At that point, the Kochs no longer allowed their contributions to be traced. But these contributions may have become even higher, as suggested by stories in the Guardian and the Washington Post.
Two dark money trusts (which promise their contributors complete anonymity), named Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, between them doled out $118 million to 102 groups, reported the Guardian. The purpose of the money was to help “build a vast network of thinktanks and activist groups working to a single purpose: to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarising ‘wedge issue.’" This funding stream, said the Guardian, “far outstripped the support from more visible opponents of climate action such as the oil industry or the conservative billionaire Koch brothers.”
However, it is possible that much of this money actually came from the Kochs: A 2014 Washington Post story suggested that these two dark money trusts were simply part of a “Koch-Backed Political Network,” which raised over $400 million for right-wing political causes in 2012.
In any case, whether Charles and David Koch have given over $100 million to support climate denialism, or “only” $67 million, this is pocket change for them: By 2010, their company, Koch Industries, was worth $35 billion; by 2013, they had brought their wealth up to $68 billion. They evidently find the use of a little pocket change to promote climate denial, and hence to head off legislation to restrict fossil-fuel burning, a worthwhile investment.
Who Would Benefit from Fabricating Global Warming?
There is a clear answer, accordingly, to the question of who benefits from climate denial. But if climate science is a lie, who would benefit from spreading this lie?
The idea that the “government” – perhaps the U.S. government, or U.S. and European governments, or perhaps most of the world’s governments - fabricated global warming would make this lie parallel to the 9/11 lie, with each being a government-created lie. But this would make no sense. Neither the U.S. government nor governments in general have wanted to reduce their burning of fossil fuels. The climate scientists of the IPCC – indeed, most climate scientists everywhere - have been pleading with governments to reduce their fossil-fuel use, but in almost all countries, the use has continued to rise.
Some people suggest that the “government” in question is the United Nations. But the U.N. is not a government and has no power to act apart from the willingness of the nations to follow its suggestions – or, in the case of the Security Council, of the nations constituting it. The U.N. did create the IPCC and supports its work, but it has no power to act on climate change other than calling meetings and publishing reports. And the IPCC did not create the idea that emissions from fossil fuels are causing global warming, which in turn causes climate change. Rather, the IPCC was formed in response to a growing consensus among climate scientists about these connections.
So, if there is a culprit for a global warming hoax, it must be the scientists themselves. And that is, indeed, what many deniers claim. For example, a 2007 documentary film, “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” argued that “the publicized scientific consensus is the product of a ‘global warming activist industry’ driven by a desire for research funding.”
Some climate scientists do indeed apply for grants, and a few of them actually receive them. But there are five reasons to doubt that the desire by scientists for funding could explain their published statements about global warming:
Although there is considerable fraud in science – as has been extensively documented - scientists who engage in fraud are a small minority. Although there are many reasons to criticize mainstream science, few scientists would consciously engage in fraud. Of course, scientists who work for corporations or government agencies must sometimes either falsify evidence or lose their jobs. Members of the 9/11 Truth Movement believe that this was the case with the scientists at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology), which was tasked with writing the reports about the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC 7. But this was an example of “controlled science,” which, as Victronix said, “is very different from the [peer-reviewed] science supporting global warming.”
Even if a few important climate scientists had published false evidence for global warming, they would not have been able to persuade most of the rest of the world’s thousands of climate scientists to support their false claims. The fact of fraud by individual scientists provides no evidence that thousands of scientists around the world could be persuaded to engage in fraud.
The support for global warming comes from a wide variety of types of evidence. The idea that all of these different experiments and tests could have been coordinated to support the same bogus conclusions makes the mind boggle.
If most scientists are primarily motivated by money, they would have gone into some other line of work. It is true that a few people, after going into science for noble reasons, have become devoted to making money to an unseemly degree. But getting government grants is seldom a road to riches. As Grant and Lamberts said: “Tell the TCCD [Typical Climate Change Denier] to go to any university car park and count the luxury vehicles parked near science buildings. They won’t even need all their fingers to keep track.”
There are indeed scientists who have made significant amounts of money by writing about globl warming, but these are scientists who have argued against climate science. For example (in addition to Singer), take Patrick Michaels, who has written many books and articles with titles such as “Global Warming Myth” and Climate of Extremes. Michaels has served as a consultant for a large number of climate denial organizations funded by ExxonMobil. And in 2006, a furor was raised when it was revealed that a coal-burning electric association had, at its members’ expense, paid Michaels $100,000 “to help confuse the issue of global warming.”
Again, if there is an analogy between 9/11 and global warming, it is not between the official 9/11 story and the theory of global warming. It is between climate science and the 9/11 Truth Community’s position. Just as large numbers of independent scientists have rejected the official 9/11 story, most climate scientists reject the idea that global warming is a hoax.
And just as a few scientists whose salaries are paid by the U.S. government have supported the official account of 9/11, Singer, Michaels, and some other scientists paid by the fossil-fuel industry have endorsed climate-change denial. In the one case, independent science is opposed by Big Government; in the other, independent science is opposed by Big Carbon. In both cases, the scientific evidence is overwhelmed by Big Money, whether this be governmental or fossil-fuel money.
The relation between climate denial and the 9/11 attacks has been described as even closer by a former U.S. Senate candidate from Vermont, Craig Hill. “[W]hat the 9/11 false-flag op and denying global warming have in common,” wrote Jerry Mazza in a summary of Hill’s thesis, “is oil, and gas . . . , and the desire to quench an unquenchable thirst for these fossil fuels.” Moreover, Hill said, just as the perpetrators of 9/11 shrouded it in unscientific myth and lie, the oil companies have also “shrouded the evil effects of warming in unscientific myth and lie.”
In other words, said Hill, both the Bush-Cheney administration and the climate deniers funded by ExxonMobil and the Kochs have foisted a false, unscientific theory on the world, especially the American people, for the sake of oil. (To be sure, Hill’s statement would need to be qualified by the fact that, as mentioned earlier, oil did not provide the only motive for the 9/11 attacks.)
Part II: Does Scientific Evidence Disprove Global Warming?
In addition to suspecting global warming to be a hoax, some members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have endorsed the view, promulgated by climate denialists, that the true facts do not support the global warming theory. Instead, these denialists argue, the facts show the global warming theory to be a fabrication.
One of those members is Australian chemist Frank Legge. Besides warning Victronix that she should “be careful about using global warming in the argument,” because it is “looking pretty shaky from a scientific point of view,” he in 2008 wrote an article called “The Global Warming Emergency.” Because this was so many years ago, I wrote Legge in November 2014 to ask if he still stands by that essay. He replied that if writing it now, he would update a few items, but “the general thrust would be exactly the same.”
Legge said that the conclusion that there is a climate emergency would require a threefold argument: (1) Global warming is occurring, it is not trivial, and the claim that the temperature and sea level will continue to rise must be based on good science; (2) “the current and predicted temperature is unusual and dangerous”; and (3) “the warming is largely caused by man-made carbon dioxide.”
1. Is Global Warming Significant and Destined to Rise?
Suggesting that global warming, if it is occurring at all, will be minor and short-lived, Legge based this suggestion on several claims, which he derived from climate-science deniers.
Satellite Data
In one of his arguments, Legge wrote: “The recent warming period is giving signs of coming to an end: satellite measurements of global atmospheric temperature have been declining this decade.” In support of that argument, Legge referred to an argument by Roy Spencer, one of the handful of climate scientists who reject the consensus view. But citing Spencer’s claim about satellite measurements hardly adds credibility to Legge’s argument.
In the 1990s, Spencer and fellow climate denier John Christy argued that the satellite data showed no warming – that the troposphere was not warming in conjunction with surface warming.
Joe Romm, a physicist who founded Climate Progress - one of the most highly respected websites dealing with climate science - said that Spencer and Christy had “created one of the most enduring denier myths,” namely, “that the satellite data didn’t show the global warming that the surface temperature data did.” A scientist on the RealClimate website wrote:
"Spencer and Christy sat by for most of a decade allowing — indeed encouraging — the use of their data set as an icon for global warming skeptics. They committed serial errors in the data analysis, but . . . did little or nothing to root out possible sources of errors, and left it to others to clean up the mess."
Spencer and Christy’s treatment of this issue, along with some others, led Romm to write an article asking, “Should You Believe Anything John Christy and Roy Spencer Say?”
Urban Heat Island Effect
Besides supporting Spencer’s argument for preferring satellite to other evidence, Legge said: “There is also ongoing debate about whether proper allowance has been made for the confounding effect of urban encroachment on temperature stations.” Legge was here referring to the so-called urban heat island (UHI) effect, which can occur when weather stations are situated in urban areas, where the air tends to be warmer than rural areas. Fellow climate denier Patrick Michaels has claimed that at least half of the alleged global warming is due to this phenomenon.
Legge, however, cited the climate denialist who has made this case most strongly, former TV weatherman Anthony Watts, who has a website called “Watts Up With That.” Watts had long argued that temperature recordings have been skewed by the fact that most recordings are made in urban areas. In 2010, Watts wrote: “UHI is easily observable. I’ve been telling readers about UHI since this blog started.”
In 2010, when Watts made this comment, it seemed for various reasons that a project called the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, organized by UC Berkeley professor Richard Muller, was soon to verify Watts’ claims. As Joe Romm explained:
Muller had long been critical of climate science, believing that many scientists and their admirers, including Al Gore, had exaggerated the evidence. Moreover, the “Climategate” charges made him suspect that climate scientists had “concealed discordant data,” about which he examined the claims of denialist bloggers.
Muller chose as a climate scientist Judith Curry, who, according to Romm, has “now taken the crown as the most debunked person on the science blogosphere” and who has, in fact, “abandon[ed] science.”
Climate denying billionaire Charles Koch was to fund the study, and Watts and other deniers were even allowed to work with the BEST team.
However, Muller chose good scientists to carry out the study, including lead scientist Robert Rohde, and the study did not work out as deniers expected. Based on data from some 40,000 weather stations around the world, the study’s results, reported the BBC, were “remarkably similar to those produced by the world's three most important and established groups, whose work had been decried as unreliable and shoddy in climate sceptic circles” – namely, the reports by NASA, NOAA, and the “collaboration between the UK Met Office and UEA's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), from which the emails that formed the basis of the ‘Climategate’ furor were hacked.” Muller told the BBC: “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK.”
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Muller said:
“When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. . . . Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.”
Writing in the New York Times, Muller called himself “a converted skeptic.” He now believes, he said, that the prior estimates of the rate of warming increase were correct and that “essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.”
Before Muller’s report had been published, Watts had written: “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise.” However, after learning what the result actually was, Watts reneged. He first refused to accept Muller’s report on the grounds that it had not yet been peer reviewed. “When the science and peer review is finished,” Watts predicted, “the results are likely to look different.”
However, when the report was published (in a peer-reviewed journal), the results, contained in five papers, were not different. In an interview, moreover, Muller emphasized the report’s main point about UHI, saying “urban heat islands contribute essentially zero to the warming.” This report, which challenged Watts’ main claim to fame, was never accepted by him, in spite of his promise.
Sensitivity: Feedback as Negative
Climate scientists acknowledge that they have an imperfect understanding of “climate sensitivity,” meaning the amount the planet will warm because of the various feedbacks affecting the climate. Sensitivity is usually discussed in terms of the temperature increase to be caused by a doubling of the preindustrial CO2 concentration of 275 parts per mission (ppm) to 550 ppm. If the sensitivity is extremely low, then doubling the concentration of CO2 would not raise the planet’s temperature much. But if sensitivity is very high, the doubling will be catastrophic. The IPCC puts the likely temperature increase to range between 2 and 4.5°C, with 3°C being most likely, and James Hansen, whose ideas are taken very seriously by fellow climate scientists, believes the increase to be near the top of that range.
By contrast, Roy Spencer argued that the sensitivity is much lower – so low in fact, reported Legge, that the feedback will be negative, not positive, so that “there is no cause for alarm.”
In 2011, Spencer argued this case in a paper that was severely criticized by climate scientists. For example, Kevin Trenberth wrote:
“[I]t is evident that this paper did not get an adequate peer review. It should not have been published [because] there is no merit whatsoever in this paper.”
The fact that it was published led the journal’s editor to resign, saying that Spencer’s paper was "fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted” by the team of reviewers, which he (the editor) had chosen.
2. Current and Predicted Warming: Not Unusual and Dangerous?
In line with Legge’s claim that insofar as there is currently some global warming, it is minor and short-lived, he also argued that the warming is not unusual and dangerous.
Medieval Warm Period
He based this view primarily on the Medieval Warm Period, citing denialist stories claiming that during this period – which occurred between the 10th and 15th centuries, A.D. - the planet was warmer than today. Referring to the fact that the Vikings had farms in Greenland, Legge said that “it appears that the present temperature is not yet quite as high as during the Medieval warming.”
However, a Skeptical Science article reported: “The Medieval Warm Period was not a global phenomenon. Warmer conditions were concentrated in certain regions.” There were indeed areas that were warmer than they were in 1990. However, “Some regions were even colder than during the Little Ice Age. To claim the Medieval Warm Period [MWP] was warmer than today is to narrowly focus on a few regions that showed unusual warmth.” When considered globally, “temperatures during the Medieval Period were less than today.”
In addition, a 2012 report in the journal Geology, headed by a scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said that “the MWP wasn’t all that warm after all - and certainly not as warm as the climate is today.” Even islands 400 miles north of Norway during the past 25 years, he said, have been “3.6°F and 4.5°F higher . . . than the summers the Vikings enjoyed.”
Present Warm Period
On the question of whether today’s temperature is dangerous in the sense that it might lead to runaway global warming, Legge argued that this “seems unlikely . . . as it did not happen in the previous warm periods.” However, that probability cannot be judged apart from the question of what has caused the recent warming, which Legge assumed to be just one more example of natural variability.
Legge’s assumption does not fit the facts. One problem is that, after a long period of decline, there was an unprecedented increase in global temperature in the 20th century. A graph tracking the temperature over the past millenium shows the 20th century as a virtually vertical line, making the graph look somewhat like a hockey stick – a change that could not be considered natural. Ever since physicist Michael Mann used this graph in a 1998 paper, denialists have argued that it was based on errors - saying, for example, that the “hockey stick is broken.” However, Mann’s conclusions have been confirmed by several studies using different sources, including boreholes, corals, ice cores, stalagmites, and tree rings.
The attempt to explain the 20th-century increase as an example of natural variation is made even more difficult by a 2013 study in Science of the global temperature for the past 11,300 years. This study showed that the planet, after the Medieval Warm Period, had been cooling for 5,000 years. But in the 20th century, this long period of cooling was abruptly ended, with the rate of warming since 1900 being 50 times greater than the rate of cooling in the previous 5000 years.
Climate deniers try to explain this 20th-century uptick in the global temperature by increased radiation from the sun, which was true of the Medieval Warm Period. However, the increase in solar radiation leveled off after 1950, so that since about 1970, greenhouse gases have clearly been the main contributor to warming. Since 1970, in fact, the sun and the climate temperature have been moving in opposite directions: While the sun has had a slight cooling trend, the climate has been getting warmer and warmer. As one scientist put it, “We should be cool, but we're not.”
This contrast has been articulated by physicist Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “Within a hundred years, the cooling of the previous 5000 years was undone,” said Rahmstorf. “[W]ithout the increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans, the slow cooling trend would have continued.”
3. The Role of Carbon Dioxide
In arguing his third claim – that CO2 cannot explain whatever recent global warming there has been – Legge employed several of the common denialist points, all of which have been answered in the literature, most systematically at Skeptical Science.
CO2 Minor Compared with Water Vapor?
One of Legge’s reasons for claiming that increased CO2 cannot explain much is that “it plays a minor role compared with water vapour.” His argument is that, because water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas, constituting most of the greenhouse effect, CO2 is insignificant.
However, although water vapor is indeed the dominant greenhouse gas, it is also the dominant feedback agent. And as CO2 emissions make the temperature go up, evaporation increases, putting more water vapor in the atmosphere, which further increases the temperature. There is, accordingly, a positive feedback loop. The water vapor feedback doubles the warming that would be caused by rising CO2 alone. As Skeptical Science explained:
“Without any feedbacks, a doubling of CO2 would warm the globe around 1°C. Taken on its own, water vapour feedback roughly doubles the amount of CO2 warming. When other feedbacks are included . . . , the total warming from a doubling of CO2 emissions is around 3°C.”
Another important factor is that, whereas the water vapor in the atmosphere is short-lived (it arises from evaporation and then falls as rain and snow), CO2 stays there for about a century. So after CO2 enters the atmosphere, it will increase the water vapor, with its powerful greenhouse effect, for a long time.
Accordingly, one should not denigrate the importance of CO2 by comparison with water vapor. Rather, they work together. It is the positive feedback relation between them that explains why the climate is so sensitive to additional CO2 emissions.
CO2 Increase Followed Temperature Increase?
According to Legge, it is an “inconvenient fact” for Al Gore “that the temperature rises about 1000 years before the CO2 level rises.” Legge was referring to the fact that, based on Antarctic ice core data from the past 400,000 years, changes in CO2 level followed temperature changes by some 600 to 1000 years. This fact has been used by climate deniers, such as U.S. Congressman Joe Barton of Texas, to argue that today’s global warming could not possibly be explained by the increasing percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere.
However, whereas the initial increase in temperature during this period was due to changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, this increase led to a positive feedback process: The rise in ocean temperatures led to releases of CO2 from the oceans into the atmosphere, which increased the planet’s warming, which in turn led to the release of more CO2 from the oceans, and so on.
As Skeptical Science explained:
“This positive feedback is necessary to trigger the shifts between glacials and interglacials as the effect of orbital changes is too weak to cause such variation.”
In fact, as Skeptical Science continued, “While the orbital cycles triggered the initial warming, overall, more than 90% of the glacial-interglacial warming occurred after that atmospheric CO2 increase.“
Global Temperature Pause?
In a third argument against the role of rising CO2, Legge said that “it is hard to see any correlation between the rising CO2 level and temperature during the last decade.” This statement reflects the apparent fact that, although CO2 and the surface air temperature of the planet went hand in hand in the 1980s and ‘90s, the two seemed to diverge in the present century: While the CO2 ppm continued to rise, the increase in the air temperature seemed to slow down. This appearance led to the conclusion that there has been an end to - or at least a pause in - global warming.
However, that conclusion was based on the equation of the planet’s temperature with its surface air temperature. This is a very big mistake, because about “90 percent of the warming of the planet is absorbed in heating the oceans.” Accordingly, there has not really been a pause, but only – in Joe Romm’s phrase, a faux pause. All that has happened is that a higher percentage of the warming than previously went into the deep ocean, evidently because of changes in the trade winds.
Global Warming’s Evil Twin
About half of the human-caused CO2 produced since the beginning of the industrial age has been absorbed by the ocean, and this absorption has resulted in ocean acidification, which Jane Lubchenco - who headed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) - called global warming’s “equally evil twin.”
Ocean acidification results from the fact that about 30 percent of our CO2 emissions have been absorbed by the ocean. This absorption keeps down the warming of the atmosphere that would otherwise be produced by these emissions. But this absorption also reduces the ocean’s PH level, thereby making the water more acidic. Tests have shown that since the industrial revolution, there has been a 30% increase in the ocean’s acidity. This acidity increases when CO2 mixes with water, resulting in carbonic acid. Just as carbonic acid eats out limestone caves, it does the same for animals with chalky skeletons, which make up a big percentage of sea life. Elevating the percentage of carbonic acid makes it increasingly difficult for these organisms - such as plankton, corals, crabs, clams, mussels, oysters, and snails - to calcify to make their skeletons.
The planet’s CO2 is now slightly above 400 ppm. If it reaches roughly 500 ppm, says one expert, “you put calcification out of business in the oceans.” If this happens, phytoplankton and corals will die, which will mean the death of all sea animals, from plankton to fish to whales. And this will greatly increase the food problem, because the ocean serves as the primary source of food for 3.5 billion people.
Part III
Climate Emergency
Once it is seen that the recent temperature increase is not due to natural variability, but instead to the increase in greenhouse gases, it is obvious that climate change is dangerous, not only because of the risk of seafood extinction and runaway global warming, which is likely to occur if global warming continues, but also because of various features of climate change, such as sea-level rise.
While admitting that the sea level had been rising, Legge said that “in the last few years [it] appears to be falling or at least to have leveled off.”
However, if the percentage of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to rise, the sea level, which rose about 8 inches (20 centimeters) in the 20th century, will rise much faster in our century. Until recently, IPCC scientists expected it to rise 3 feet (roughly 1 meter) by 2100, with some scientists predicting more like 6 to 7 feet (2 meters). But in 2015, leading climate scientist James Hansen and 16 fellow scientists released a new study saying that, if fossil fuels are not radically curtailed, the ocean could rise 10 feet (about 3 meters) before the end of the century.
The sea has already risen enough to force people - such as those in Bangladesh, the Sundarbans, and the Carteret islands – to move, because their lands flooded or at least became too salty to farm. Also, the same fate threatens the coastal areas of many countries, including Australia, China, Japan, and the United States. “If you live in South Florida and you’re not building a boat,” said a geology professor in Florida, “you’re not facing reality.”
In addition, although sea-level rise may be the most obvious danger created by global warming-caused climate change, there are dangers in every feature of climate change – as I have documented in the first part of my Unprecedented:
- The weather, which has recently become extreme, will continue to get more extreme.
- Heat waves will become hotter, eventually becoming so hot that humans and plants will not be able to survive.
- Droughts will last more often and longer, with some places becoming permanently dry; and the drier weather will result in more and worse wildfires.
- Storms of various types – rain storms, snow storms, hurricanes, and tornadoes - will become more deadly.
- Fresh water will become increasingly insufficient, due to various factors, including loss of snowpack and the melting of glaciers (which provide the major source of water for billions of people).
- Food will become increasingly insufficient, due to drought, excessive heat, sea-level rise, and fresh-water shortage (as well as loss of seafood because of ocean acidification).
- Sea-level rise and other features of climate disruption will increasingly create climate refugees and climate wars.
Contrary to Legge’s supposition, therefore, we do have a climate emergency.
The website for Skeptical Science - which advocates “getting skeptical about global warming skepticism” – has rebutted (under “Arguments”) over 175 denialist claims, beginning with the most popular ones, such as “climate’s changed before,” “it’s the sun,” “it’s not bad,” and “there is no consensus.” In most cases, these claims can quickly be seen to be false with only a little study, so people who support them are either deceivers or deceived.
The deceivers are the fossil-fuel companies, along with their hirelings, who make these claims while knowing them to be false. As pointed out above, the oil companies have known this since 1995, just as tobacco companies have known cigarettes to be carcinogenic since 1965.
The deceived are those who believe these claims while being unaware, as journalist Mark Hertsgaard said, “that they are mouthing talking points originally developed by big money interests.”
Many climate deniers identify with the Tea Party, which was originally portrayed in the press as if it were a spontaneous grassroots movement. In reality, however, it is an example of astroturfing, in which seemingly grassroots campaigns have been manufactured to mask the sponsor’s identity. In this case, the Tea Party was created by the Koch brothers (whose father had been one of the founders of the John Birch Society), especially by David Koch through his organization, Americans for Prosperity. Although Americans for Prosperity claimed to be a grassroots organization, and although David Koch tried to deny responsibility for it, the evidence shows it to be largely his creation - as indicated by the title of Jean Mayer’s New Yorker article “Covert Operations,” along with the title of a New York Magazine article, “The Billionaire’s Party.”
The covert operations of this billionaire’s party are carried out only on behalf of causes that support Koch interests, which generally are not the interests of the members of the Tea Party. Frank Rich wrote:
“When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket . . . , his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes.”
Although the Kochs call themselves libertarians, they are “libertarians who hate the free market” (as pointed out by an article discussing the Koch brothers as “America’s Greediest”).
In an essay entitled “The Tea Party Movement: Deluded and Inspired by Billionaires,” George Monbiot said that the Tea Party is “mostly composed of passionate, well-meaning people who think they are fighting elite power, unaware that they have been organised by the very interests they believe they are confronting.”
Likewise, Frank Rich wrote that the agendas of the Kochs often run counter to “the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News,” after which Rich added: “The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests.” And the Koch brothers do, incidentally, keep going to the bank: From 2010 to 2013, as mentioned earlier, they raised the value of their company from $35 billion to $68 billion.
Conclusion
I wrote this article because members of the 9/11 Truth Movement should not let themselves be deceived by the fossil-fuel corporations and the front-organizations they have created. Holding that the Bush-Cheney administration gave the public a completely unscientific account of what happened on 9/11, the members of this movement should not accept the completely anti-scientific denial of global warming and climate change. Seeing the official story of 9/11 as a self-serving lie sold by Big Government, the members of the 9/11 Truth Movement should not fall for the self-serving lie told by Big Money.
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