By Emanuel Sferios
September 11, 2006
Five years ago--on my birthday--the shadow government of the United States
murdered over 3,000 of its own citizens (and hundreds of others) in a "false
flag" operation designed to galvanize public support behind a war for control of
the world's last remaining energy reserves. Many of us quickly saw through the
"big lie" of 9/11 and began a movement to expose it, to reveal the truth, in the
hopes that this would bring an end to the War on Terror, a war destined--if it
continues--to turn nuclear.
And now, five years later, what have we accomplished?
In short, everything and nothing. We began this movement to convince the
American public and the world that the official story of 9/11 was a lie, and
that ruling factions within our own government were the real perpetrators. This
we accomplished. Opinion polls conducted over the last two years show that the
majority of Americans believe the US government was complicit. We mbarded every
mainstream and alternative medium available with information, from Air America
to internet blogs. We handed out leaflets in cities and towns across the
country, held signs on street corners, wrote letters to everyone we could think
of.
And you know what?
It worked. Today it is rare that I talk to
a person who doesn't believe the US Government was involved in the attacks in
some way. Compared to just two years ago, when people would look at us like we
were crazy for suggesting such a thing, this is an amazing success.
Or so it seems. For at the same time, not a single perpetrator of 9/11 has
been prosecuted, and the War on Terror continues unabated, as does the endless
stream of lies and propaganda designed to keep us fearful and compliant. Why
this discrepancy? What accounts for the 9/11 Truth Movement's seeming victory in
shattering the American public's blind acceptance of the official story, and the
stark reality that nothing has changed politically? In other words, why, in the
midst of total success, have we failed?
This is the question I have been asking myself over the last few years. As
co-founder of the first national activist organization for 9/11 truth, the 9/11
Visibility Project http://www.septembereleventh.org I
devoted two full years of my life to building this movement. And to see it grow
from a handful of struggling yet dedicated individuals into the enormous yet
ultimately ineffective movement it is today, saddens me to no end. Thus for me
this is not merely an academic question. I mean it honestly: why, in the midst
of a seeming total success, have we failed?
The answer to this question, many have concluded, involves the lack of
political will of the people of the United States. It is one thing to know the
truth, and quite another to act upon that truth. Democracy Now is a case in
point. A great many of us have had conversations with Amy Goodman and the other
producers of Democracy Now, and they all know the official story of 9/11 is a
lie. Yet except for a few segments we forced them to air as a result of our
public pressure campaign (where they for the most part ridiculed us), they have
chosen not only to ignore 9/11 truth, but to affirm the official story again and
again in their rogramming.
Many other examples can be given, not only from the left media, but from
senators, congressmen, Eliot Spitzer, etc. How many of these people know the
truth, yet do nothing? (Cynthia McKinney may be the one notable exception).
Where is the political will?
But to blame the American people alone for their lack of courage in opposing
US imperialism fails to ultimately answer the question, for we must also ask why
such a lack of courage exists in the first place.Certainly it isn't a lack of
courage in general. The American population regularly demonstrates great
courage and political will when it comes to social and domestic issues.
And neither do I believe, as some cynical observers claim, that the
majority of Americans secretly support US imperialism, that given the choice
they would rather see millions of innocent foreigners die than reduce their own
oil consumption and powerdown. If such was the case, there would have been no
need for a 9/11, and there would be no need for the ongoing lies and
deceptions. Simply citing the lack of political will among the American public
thus begs the question, for the answer we seek is exactly that which accounts
for this lack of courage when facing the truth of 9/11.
Here is my assessment. The reason for the discrepancy between what people
know about 9/11 and what they are willing to do to stop the War on Terror; the
reason we have ultimately failed, in other words, has to do with the scope and
sophistication of the political and social control mechanisms used against us;
namely, disruption and disinformaiton. I have been an activist for 20 years, and
I have seen and experienced COINTELPRO-style disruption many times in the past.
Yet never before have I witnessed it used on such a scale and with such
precision as I have within the 9/11 Truth Movement. There are thousands of
examples, but let me give you just a few.
1. When we launched our Democracy Now campaign, we asked activists and the
general public to send them emails requesting they have David Ray Griffin on
their show. We provided a sample letter, but encouraged people to write their
own, and we asked them always to be polite. We also provided them the email
addresses to send their letters, and we included our own email address in
the mix, so we could see what kinds of letters Democracy Now was receiving. What
happened was very telling. For every two or three emails they received that were
respectful and well-written, they received one that was either highly insulting,
vehemently anti-semitic, or down-right ludicrous. The timing and repetitive use
of specific phrases among many of these emails revealed a coordinated effort to
disrupt our campaign and convince Democracy Now not to associate with us.
2. When we launched our campaign to get the attorney General of New York
State, Eliot Spitzer, to open a new investigation into 9/11, we began an online
petition drive and received thousands of signatures. Shortly after our campaign
website went up, another website was launched duplicating our campaign and
promoting preposterous claims designed to make the 9/11 Truth Movement appear
ridiculous. Thus a clear message was sent to Eliot Spitzer that opening a new
investigation into 9/11 could easily destroy his reputation by associating with
people who believe, among other nonsense, that the planes on 9/11 were merely
holograms inserted onto TV screens.
And these are just examples of reactive disruption efforts (in response to
things we do), which aren't even the primary methods they use against us.
Controlling Your Opposition by Becoming It
One lesson the shadow government has learned over the last 40 years is that
the best way to defeat your opposition is to become your opposition, and like
many of those phony socialist and anti-war groups on college campuses that suck
rebellious student energy and dissipate it ineffectively, preventing the
formation of a legitimate, effective opposition, so have they taken over a large
part of the 9/11 Truth Movement itself, channeling new skeptics (and old) into
endless debates around physical evidence and other ineffective actions. During
my entire time within the movement, I never once named publicly any individuals
or websites I thought were intentionally promoting disinformation, or leading us
down useless avenues, nor will I now. (This is to protect myself from
reprisals, to avoid the further disruption caused by the endless cycle of
"snitch jacketing," and because you can never really prove who is an agent and
who is simply duped by the disinfo itself, much of which is easily believable on
the surface.) But to prove that agents are among us, and
that they have
succeeded in taking over the bulk of the movement, one needs to go no further
than compare the number of people who believe no plane hit the Pentagon with the
number of people who know about the simultaneous wargames that were taking place
on the morning of 9/11, and that prevented NORAD from intercepting the
planes before they hit their targets.
The former claim, widely believed, is perhaps the most successful and
sophisticated isinformation campaign injected into the 9/11 Truth Movement.
Supported by doctored video footage released by the Pentagon itself, it has
almost single-handedly made the movement the laughing stock of Washington DC
residents, hundreds of whom saw the plane hit the building, and thousands of
whom have relatives or friends who did. And
this was likely its intention,
for it has successfully alienated from the movement precisely those DC
professionals (senators, congressmen, federal judges, prosecutors, etc.) who
hold enough power to effectively investigate and prosecute the crime. It has
also been the primary wedge used to divide the movement from itself. While there
is no space here
to delve into the details of the "no plane at the
Pentagon" hoax, I am forever indebted to Mark Robinowitz for having the
stubborn persistency to keep challenging me back when I, too, believed the hoax. I
am also immensely grateful to Jim Hoffman for his unparalleled analysis of
the Pentagon physical evidence http://911research.wtc7.net/pentagon
On the other hand, the wargames comprise the very heart of the operation. On
the morning of 9/11 itself, the FAA and NORAD were occupied in air defense
drills simulating none other than multiple airline hijackings. These drills
included fake blips inserted onto their radar screens, as well as remotely
controlled aircraft in the air posing as passenger jets. Thus the perpetrators
of 9/11 (those overseeing the wargames) were able to incapacitate the US air
defense system without having to order a stand-down, allowing the operation to
succeed. Because of the wargames, NORAD personnel did not know where to send the
fighter jets when the supposedly "real" hijackings took place (likely also being
flown by
remote control). They acknowledged this during the 9/11 Commission
hearings, with no follow-up questioning of course.
How many people have heard of the wargames compared to the "no plane at the
Pentagon" theory? How many 9/11 Truth websites make reference to the
wargames compared with the Pentagon hoax? And how many 9/11 truth activist
organizations do you know emphasizing the wargames as opposed to all the various
physical evidence arguments? The answer to these questions will tell you a lot
about the state of the movement, and who really controls it. (Incidentally, the
world should be forever indebted to Mike Ruppert, who put the pieces
together about the wargames and presented them in
their proper light, first
on stage to a small audience in Toronto, which included myself, and then in full
detail in his book, Crossing the Rubicon.)
So we shouldn't place all the blame upon those individuals who willfully
ignore the truth of 9/11. Certainly there is an element of cowardice involved, a
lack of integrity, and a selling out. We know, for example, that Democracy Now
received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Ford Foundation specifically
to report on 9/11. But what would happen to
Democracy Now if Amy Goodman
chose integrity over money? The same thing, perhaps, that happened to Mike
Ruppert?
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/081606_burning_bridge.shtml
This
is not to excuse Goodman's willful ignorance, her selling out to the very
government she professes to oppose. (I don't listen to her show anymore, but I
read From The Wilderness every day.) I simply want to recognize the immense
power of that government, a power that can murder 3,000 people and get away with
it, a power that can induce good
activists to sell out, and better ones to
flee the country. (Living to fight another day is not so condemnable, after
all.) Herein lies an important factor in our failure.
More About Disinformation
One of the characteristics of 9/11 disinformation a lot
of people have a hard time grasping is that much of it is designed specifically
to convince people of US government complicity in 9/11. This might seem like a
contradiction, until one understands that 9/11 disinfo is part of a broader
system of mass manipulation where the opposing perspective plays an essential
role. The basic idea is to control both sides of the debate, and frame it in a
way that makes the opposing side ineffective (not necessarily unbelievable). In
the end it doesn't matter whether even a majority of the people believe the US
government was complicit in 9/11 (this is already the case). What matters is only that
the perpetrators can never successfully be prosecuted. Thus they pollute the
body of evidence with red herrings and false lines of inquiry. If, in the
process, they happen to cause some people to disbelieve the official story (as
in the case with the "no plane at the Pentagon" hoax), all the better, because
the end result is a weakening of any legal case that might be brought against
them.
There is an important quote by E. Martin Schotz from his
book, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the
Murder of President Kennedy. It is: "One of the primary means of immobilizing
the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of
confusion in which anything can be believed and nothing can be known."
Conspiracy theories, in other words, provide the perfect cover for real
conspiracies. When anything can be believed because the available information is
a convoluted mix of truth, falsehood and probability; when the actual truth
itself is convoluted, involving deception, mystery and illusion; then one
is ultimately left to their own emotions to decide. And emotions, of course, can
be easily manipulated. What do you *want* to believe? After all, it's up to you. You'll
never know the truth, or at least you'll never be able to prove it in a court of
law. Do you really want to be marginalized and ridiculed as a conspiracy
theorist? You get the idea.
The World Trade Center Collapse: A Necessary Illusion
In my two years of 9/11 truth activism, I never emphasized the physical
evidence. I always knew it was a dead end that would suck the movement's energy
and accomplish nothing. But let me be straight up for a moment, if a bit
speculative, because thinking about these things is helpful. They demolished the
World Trade Center towers with explosives. I have no doubt about this, just as I
have no doubt that the planes were flown by remote control. I also believe that
hijackers did, in fact, board the planes (despite the articles claiming some of
those named are still alive). I think the hijackers were trained US operatives
(patsies), and that they likely did not know they were going to die. I also
think the most probable explanation for the shoot-down of flight 93 is that the
passengers did, in fact, storm the cockpit, only to discover that the plane was
being flown by remote control. And so in order to prevent any of them from
calling their loved ones and blabbing (yes, phones can work on planes),
they had to shoot it down. Or perhaps the hijackers themselves learned
their real fate and allowed the passengers into the cockpit to try to regain
control of the aircraft. We'll never really know, and this is the idea.
"Anything can be believed," and so it is equally plausible, as others have
speculated, that the shoot-down of Flight 93 was planned from the beginning.
But the World Trade Center demolition is obvious, which leads to an important
question: why did they do it? Wouldn't simply crashing the planes into the
buildings have been enough? Why bring them down completely? The typical
responses here apply: They needed their "New Pearl Harbor," a mass casualty
event to shock the public into supporting a retaliatory war. They also needed a
spectacle that wouldn't be easily forgotten. These explanations are true enough.
Another often cited and plausible one is that they needed to make the lie
obvious enough that the people who mattered (government, corporate, and military
leaders, for example) would know that they--the secret government within the
government--did this and got away with it. This sends a powerful message of
invincibility to anyone who might be thinking of opposing them. And the fact
that they demolished building 7 later that evening in a classic-style demolition
sure seems to support that argument. It's as if they were saying, "just in case
you didn't get it the first time, we'll show you one even more obvious."
But there is another reason they demolished the World
Trade Center towers, in my opinion the most important reason, which is that they
needed the lie to be incredible. As Hitler and Goebbels understood, the bigger
and more incredible the lie, the more people will believe it, because they will
have to make a bigger psychological leap in order to disbelieve it.
Mass manipulation of this kind plays on the natural desire
many people have to conform, and it is much more difficult, psychologically, for
the conforming individual to disbelieve a popularly-held incredible lie than a
mundane one, for to do so would set one widely apart from the herd. To put this
another way, imagine if they had merely crashed four planes into the ocean. How much easier it would
be then for people to speculate that the government may have done this as a
pretext for war. To do so would not require a really incredible contradiction of
the official story, marginalizing oneself from the mainstream. It would not be
so easy to dismiss such claims as "outrageous conspiracy theory," and ridicule
would be less effective. What is important to remember here is that propaganda
of this sort is not designed to fool critical thinkers, but to provide
conforming individuals with a reason not to start thinking critically. Thus the
total destruction of the World Trade Center in such a dramatic yet obvious way
was, in my opinion, an essential, psychological component of the
operation.
Note: I have assumed that the reader of this article has
some familiarity with the 9/11 Truth movement, and at least a rudimentary
understanding of the physics involved in the World Trade Center Collapse. If
not, there is an excellent, brand new DVD available: an in-depth analysis of the
WTC Collapse from scientists Steven Jones and Kevin Ryan. Steven Jones is a
professor of physics at BYU, who has risked his reputation to challenge the
government's official "pancake" theory of the collapse. A sincere and
courageous academic who dared to come forward with the truth, he has
subsequently been approached by less honest persons who many believe are trying
to tarnish his reputation, in part by association with repugnant, anti-semitic
viewpoints. And Kevin Ryan is a former lab manager at Underwriters Labs, the
company that tested and certified the steel used in the World Trade Center. He
was fired when he went public with information about the cover-up in a
whistle-blowing letter we first published in November of 2004. In this DVD he
explains in detail why the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
report on the World Trade Center collapse is a lie. This is a professionally
produced DVD with high-quality illustrations and graphics. Even if you are not new to the
physics of the World Trade Center Collapse, it's worth watching. We are offering
this DVD for a small donation here:
http://www.septembereleventh.org/donations.php
Conclusion
In the Spring of this year, I gave a presentation on 9/11 truth to the Howard
Dean supporters during a Democracy For America conference in Portland, Oregon.
(Here is an mp3 of my talk if you want to listen to it:
http://septembereleventh.org/documents/deaniac.mp3)
I felt bad afterwards because
there were a lot of new and enthusiastic 9/11 truth activists in the audience,
folks who had only recently broke free from the matrix, so to speak, and I
basically told them that I felt the movement was over, that we had failed, and
that the window of opportunity for obtaining justice for 9/11 was closed for
good. While I still believe this, after my talk I realized I didn't leave any of
these new activists with much hope. I want
to try and do that now. Yet I don't want to reaffirm a false hope that the
perpetrators of 9/11 will ever be prosecuted. Rather, I want to try to help
people transcend and integrate the truth of 9/11 into a broader awareness of the
state of the world today, a world where there is much to be hopeful about.
The world today stands on the brink of a confluence three major, global
crises: peak oil, global warming and the imminent collapse of the global banking
system. All of these are inter-related, and have greed as their ultimate cause.
Greed is the common human trait of wanting more than one really needs to be
healthy and happy. It exists in all of us, to
varying degrees. Gluttony, for example, the desire for more
food or drink than one really needs, is a form of greed. So is lust. Envy, the
desire to have what others have, is another form of greed. Greed, to put it
another way, is the psyche's unquenchable thirst for ever-increasing amounts of
material energy. It is the false identification of the Self with the material world, and while I don't want to get overly
religious or spiritual here, it is important to understand this, because it
allows us to empathize with those whom we may perceive as our enemies,
those whom we believe are somehow different from us (yet there really is no
"other"). It is only with compassion that we can begin to see the true nature
of 9/11, the truth behind the truth, so to speak.
9/11 was a pretext to launch the War on Terror, a war to
control the world's remaining energy reserves in order to maintain the
over-consumptive lifestyle that Dick Cheney insists is "not negotiable."
And the War on Terror was conceived in response to peak oil, which threatens to
end the current system of corporate greed, over-consumption and exploitation.
That system requires ever-increasing amounts of material energy to continue, and
peak oil is nothing less than the end of that increase. The War on Terror is,
therefore, a war on "terra" to maintain the illusion of perpetual growth, the
myth that over-consumption can go on forever. It is an extreme manifestation of the
ego's desperate attempt to live forever, and it is doomed to fail. The earth is
finite, and we cannot continue to to deplete its energy forever.
This can be seen as a crisis, which certainly it is, but it is only so in the
sense that it demands a transformation of our political and economic systems,
our consumption-based lifestyles, and our self-identities. As such it is also an
opportunity, an opportunity to transcend our own greed, to face the truth of who
we really are (interconnected with everyone else, and with the earth), and to
make the necessary and inevitable
sacrifices required of us. (Remember that
sacrifice is not the giving up of the things we need. It is the giving up of the
things we don't need, including our illusions.)
The neocons are so far unable to make this necessary transformation. They are
trapped in the very system they have created, but there are those all across the
planet who are trying, starting small and making some of the necessary
sacrifices. People are struggling everywhere to create cooperative institutions
of mutual aid and solidarity, to resist the
forces of ignorance and greed.
One needs look no further then the Bolivarian Revolution sweeping across Central
and South America to understand this. And there are many people here in the US,
as well, exerting the same efforts, implementing a powerdown strategy
and working towards the re-localization of social and political
institutions.
The question lies in whether the forces of light
(reason, compassion, truth) will overcome the forces of darkness (greed, fear,
ignorance), whether the spirit of the Bolivarian Revolution will sweep over
the world, or whether the neocons and their counterparts in other countries
will sweep the world away. This is up to us to decide, both collectively
and individually, and we are
constantly making that decision every moment, in every action we undertake. In
that light, let us always remember that we can't really fight fire with fire. We
fight fire with water, and to the degree that we have failed thus far to end the
War on Terror, is to the degree that we have based our own actions--our own
activism--on anger
or fear. I am no exception, and yet like many, I
aspire.
Thank you for reading this.
And remember,
the real path
Towards Peace and Truth
begins
within.
Emanuel Sferios
Webmaster,
SeptemberEleventh.org
The Above was the content of an email I received
from the author. You can visit the SeptemberEleventh.Org website Here
