Rosebud #7
Where Am I?... Who Are We?
A magazine I like and often read had a cover story last week in honor of the approaching fifth anniversary of 9/11: “What if 9/11 Never Happened?” The sub-head might have read, "How the American Media Deals With 9/11.”
We’re way past a moment, here, I think. We’re well into the middle of a horror flick, one masquerading as a family drama called Honey, I Shrunk the Democracy!
Life goes on, no questions asked. 9/11 serves as the basis for illegal war, torture, government spying; prison camps; the suspension of habeus corpus; for everything that was once considered against our values, against everything that made us Americans. Now it has become American. Down is up. Wrong is right. All because of 9/11.
My husband and I were coming back from a trip abroad a couple of summers ago and, for whatever reason (they don’t need a reason) the cops decided to take him into a back room and question him and look through his bags. They wouldn’t let me come in, wouldn’t even let me stand outside the door. When I protested, they made me leave the airport, leaving my husband behind, under threat of arrest. It was 9/11 by Alfred Hitchcock. A cop said to me angrily, “How can you question us, after 9/11?”
My only question was, “Why?” Which is what reporters are supposed to ask, along with “Who, what, where, when, and how?”
As in, why were countless warnings about 9/11 ignored?
Why did President Bush refuse to testify in public before the 9/11 Commission Committee? Why were there no recordings of his testimony? Why did he insist that Vice President Dick Cheney be at his side?
Why did so many people, including firemen and newscasters at the scene, hear explosions going off in the World Trade Center Towers? Why does their collapse look so much like a controlled demolition? (See the work of physicist Steven Jones.)
How did World Trade Center Building 7—which housed the New York offices of the CIA, FBI, DOD, SEC and the Secret Service, not to mention Rudy Guiliani's Office of Emergency Management—fall, on 9/11, at 5:20 p.m., after suffering what some firemen said were containable fires on the upper floors?
How did a 757 disappear into a 20-foot hole in the Pentagon?
When was Donald Rumsfeld told there were hijacked planes in the air, and why didn't he order a shoot-down? (See Rosebud #6).
Why wasn't Ground Zero treated as a crime scene?
Why weren't the black boxes for the downed airliners found?
And while we're at it, what's up with the hunt for Osama?
One thing I know: When Americans are told that there’s something wrong with asking questions, then it’s time to start asking some questions.
9/11 has become an untouchable myth, its sacredness now approaching the religious aura around the Holocaust. But while Jews have been asked repeatedly to provide proof of how millions of their people—along with dissenters and Gypsies and gays and other souls—just happened to disappear between 1938 and 1945, nobody’s asking for any proof of how close to 3,000 Americans disappeared (poof; somehow leaving behind hardly any of their bodies, as if they were blown to bits; check out the coroner’s report) one bright September morning. Nobody in the mainstream American media is asking, anyway. Why?
Recently I was contacted by a young reporter who said he was doing a story on “9/11 conspiracy theories” and the media. He seemed to have what some reporters call “an angle," and his “angle” was, “Isn’t it dangerous that these bloggers are spreading 9/11 conspiracies on the Internet?”
I directed him to a number of web sites where, I told him, it seems to me many intelligent and educated people are doing investigative work on 9/11 on their own, in the absence of reporting in the American media. I told him about scholarsfortruth.org, 911truth.org, 911blogger.org. I told him about a number of books, including The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, by David Ray Griffin, a professor of theology at the Claremont School of Theology, and The War On Freedom: How And Why America Was Attacked, by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, which won Italy’s highest literary prize.
I told him, I believe these are people who care about the survival of the democracy, people who just want the truth
“Yeah,” he argued, “but they’re not *journalists.*”
p.s. Since some of you have asked: Rosebud is getting anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 hits a day. Thanks to everyone who has sent emails. I've heard from England, Australia, Italy, India, Holland, Sweden and all over the U.S.
A magazine I like and often read had a cover story last week in honor of the approaching fifth anniversary of 9/11: “What if 9/11 Never Happened?” The sub-head might have read, "How the American Media Deals With 9/11.”
We’re way past a moment, here, I think. We’re well into the middle of a horror flick, one masquerading as a family drama called Honey, I Shrunk the Democracy!
Life goes on, no questions asked. 9/11 serves as the basis for illegal war, torture, government spying; prison camps; the suspension of habeus corpus; for everything that was once considered against our values, against everything that made us Americans. Now it has become American. Down is up. Wrong is right. All because of 9/11.
My husband and I were coming back from a trip abroad a couple of summers ago and, for whatever reason (they don’t need a reason) the cops decided to take him into a back room and question him and look through his bags. They wouldn’t let me come in, wouldn’t even let me stand outside the door. When I protested, they made me leave the airport, leaving my husband behind, under threat of arrest. It was 9/11 by Alfred Hitchcock. A cop said to me angrily, “How can you question us, after 9/11?”
My only question was, “Why?” Which is what reporters are supposed to ask, along with “Who, what, where, when, and how?”
As in, why were countless warnings about 9/11 ignored?
Why did President Bush refuse to testify in public before the 9/11 Commission Committee? Why were there no recordings of his testimony? Why did he insist that Vice President Dick Cheney be at his side?
Why did so many people, including firemen and newscasters at the scene, hear explosions going off in the World Trade Center Towers? Why does their collapse look so much like a controlled demolition? (See the work of physicist Steven Jones.)
How did World Trade Center Building 7—which housed the New York offices of the CIA, FBI, DOD, SEC and the Secret Service, not to mention Rudy Guiliani's Office of Emergency Management—fall, on 9/11, at 5:20 p.m., after suffering what some firemen said were containable fires on the upper floors?
How did a 757 disappear into a 20-foot hole in the Pentagon?
When was Donald Rumsfeld told there were hijacked planes in the air, and why didn't he order a shoot-down? (See Rosebud #6).
Why wasn't Ground Zero treated as a crime scene?
Why weren't the black boxes for the downed airliners found?
And while we're at it, what's up with the hunt for Osama?
One thing I know: When Americans are told that there’s something wrong with asking questions, then it’s time to start asking some questions.
9/11 has become an untouchable myth, its sacredness now approaching the religious aura around the Holocaust. But while Jews have been asked repeatedly to provide proof of how millions of their people—along with dissenters and Gypsies and gays and other souls—just happened to disappear between 1938 and 1945, nobody’s asking for any proof of how close to 3,000 Americans disappeared (poof; somehow leaving behind hardly any of their bodies, as if they were blown to bits; check out the coroner’s report) one bright September morning. Nobody in the mainstream American media is asking, anyway. Why?
Recently I was contacted by a young reporter who said he was doing a story on “9/11 conspiracy theories” and the media. He seemed to have what some reporters call “an angle," and his “angle” was, “Isn’t it dangerous that these bloggers are spreading 9/11 conspiracies on the Internet?”
I directed him to a number of web sites where, I told him, it seems to me many intelligent and educated people are doing investigative work on 9/11 on their own, in the absence of reporting in the American media. I told him about scholarsfortruth.org, 911truth.org, 911blogger.org. I told him about a number of books, including The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, by David Ray Griffin, a professor of theology at the Claremont School of Theology, and The War On Freedom: How And Why America Was Attacked, by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, which won Italy’s highest literary prize.
I told him, I believe these are people who care about the survival of the democracy, people who just want the truth
“Yeah,” he argued, “but they’re not *journalists.*”
p.s. Since some of you have asked: Rosebud is getting anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 hits a day. Thanks to everyone who has sent emails. I've heard from England, Australia, Italy, India, Holland, Sweden and all over the U.S.
posted by NancyJo at 11:39 AM
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