[Peace-discuss] Re: solution to a non-problem (fwd)

[C. G. Estabrook]

Jim--

Thomas Pynchon's wonderful novel, Gravity's Rainbow -- unfortunately as
apropos now as when it appeared thirty years ago -- contains his "Proverbs
for Paranoids," and #3 is, "If they can get you asking the wrong
questions, they don't have to worry about answers."

I think questions of the form, "What did the president (VP/FBI/CIA/SPCA,
etc.) know, and when did he(it) know it?" fall afoul of Pynchon's rule.
First, because there's little chance that the ruling group in the US knew
about the place and nature of the attacks before 9/11, so most of these
questions are a matter of administrative blame-shifting.

Second, and more important, I know that if I wanted to protect from public
scrutiny the long-term goals and policies of the US in the Middle East,
I'd much rather have press and populace talking about the who-knew-what
questions than about the reasons that the 9/11 attacks occurred.  

The supposed perpetrators have been pretty clear about what prompted those
attacks -- (a) American occupation and support for repressive governments
in the Holy Land, (b) the near-genocide of a generation of Iraqis, and (c)  
the brutal suppression of the Palestinians for more than a generation.  
And on these points, if not on their chosen tactics, many people in the
Middle East and elsewhere agree with them.

Now it seems to me that if we in the US want to stop terrorism, there are
two paramount questions to ask; (1) how do we stop our government from
practicing it? and (2) how do we alter the US policies that lead other
people to undertake it?

It's not to the long-term interests of the American government to ask those
questions -- but those interests can stand an investigation of, say, Bush
family business contacts with the Saudis.  The Proverb for Paranoids kicks
in.

Regards, Carl


On Fri, 7 Jun 2002, Jim Buell wrote:

> 
> >But many conspiracy theories are
> >inherently conservative and, one might say, anti-political -- at best a
> >distraction from the real political tasks, at worst a (conspiracy of)
> >misdirection...
> >
> >And that may be true of some speculations about 9/11.  Regards, Carl
> 
> You may well be right, Carl. I guess I'm just a little mystified by
> why the debate on the left seems to be tending toward
> conspiracy-versus-structural-factors (such as class, wealth and power
> concentration). It strikes me that most often in popular discourse,
> theories that posit some sort of secretive collusion come in contrast
> to official explanations of the one-lone-nut variety (that Oswald,
> Sirhan Sirhan, McVeigh, Ray, etc. did it, all alone, because they were
> crazy).  Unless we're to believe that at least 19 and more likely
> closer to several hundred crazy people each acted independently and
> without collusion to bring about 9-11 (infinite monkeys with infinite
> typewriters producing Shakespeare), then obviously some sort of
> collusion and conspiring went on - the remaining questions are, who
> all was involved and on what level, who knew on some level what was
> going on, and who was actively working for whatever reasons to keep
> the information from being known? Official accounts tell us these
> events were all masterminded by a lone nut in a cave, with a Svengali
> hold over some other lone nuts who in turn fooled a few others into
> helping them out. Well, maybe. But I don't see why pointing out the
> extreme unlikeliness of this sort of explanation, and actively
> searching out evidence for more plausible ones, is tantamount to
> letting structural factors off the hook.
> 
> Structural-factors explanations point a finger toward why some
> dramatically discontinuous events may have occurred, and what needs to
> be done to improve matters - e.g., what might have led individuals and
> groups to have acted as they did and do, before, during and after
> 9/11, and how those things need to be changed. Agreed,
> grand-conspiracy notions that set up Freemasons, space aliens,
> Rockefellers, Bilderburgers, Discordians, Jews, Catholics, British
> royals or the Trilateral Commission as all-powerful are just plain
> wacky. But little conspiracies happen all the time, with conscious
> intent and intentional covering-up. The closer that we all can get to
> the details of those little conspiracies as they converged to create
> the Sept. 11 events, the better we'll understand just what happened
> and is continuing to happen, and the better shot we'll have at
> transforming social and economic structures to move closer, in Green
> parlance, to relations built on social justice, ecological wisdom,
> nonviolence and grassroots democracy. And even if we can't quite
> achieve that, we'll be able to get the goods on some very dirty
> players in the corridors of power, stand a fair chance of getting them
> tossed out and saving the skins of many good people in the process,
> and earn the opportunity to start over with a new crop of villains not
> quite so well entrenched. (If a nuclear armageddon doesn't come first,
> as too many of the current villains seem to be half-looking for.)
> 
> Salim Muwakkil, in the cover story in this week's In These Times
> (http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/26/15/feature1.shtml), has a much
> more favorable opinion of those who are currently derided as
> conspiracy-mongers than David Corn, Michael Albert and Norm Solomon
> have evidenced in recent weeks. At the conclusion of this piece, he
> recommends "following the money"  as the most promising line for
> investigation - "When found, that money is likely to be drenched in
> oil and politically flammable." That prediction is very much in line
> with what can be found in some of the items at various "conspiracy"
> sites - www.copvcia.com, www.globalresearch.ca, www.rense.com, etc. -
> and some of the better-sourced information that originates on sites
> like those does, thankfully, make its way at some point to the Common
> Dreams site, the Nation, In These Times, and the occasional
> corporate-media piece like the ABC and NBC items I cited last night.
> 
> By the way, a key source in all this continues to be Greg Palast, the
> American journalist who works for the BBC and whose work gets nearly
> no play in the US. (He's also broken major stories on Enron and on the
> Florida election fraud, both recounted in his current book, The Best
> Democracy Money Can Buy.) Palast was a guest this spring on Bob
> McChesney's WILL-AM show and on Focus 580, and he appeared just this
> afternoon on Democracy Now with some startling and well-researched
> information about precisely how the Bush crew (and Clinton people
> before them) stomped on investigations into the financing of bin
> Laden's terror network, in the months leading up to Sept. 11.
> Unfortunately, I just found out that WEFT screwed up and didn't get
> the show today - they're running a cart of Radio Nation right now
> instead! (No, I'm sure it wasn't a conspiracy ;-).) Today's DN is
> available on www.democracynow.org as an mp3 file (and in RealAudio
> format), and I've also made a copy of it as an audio CD that I can
> leave over at the IMC if people are interested.
> 
> jb