[Peace-discuss] Makes me want to see "Loose Change"

[Chuck Minne]

9/11 fantasists pose a mortal danger to popular oppositional campaigns

These conspiracy idiots are a boon for Bush and Blair as they destroy the movements some of us have spent years building 

George Monbiot
Tuesday February 20, 2007
The Guardian 

    'You did this hit piece because your corporate masters instructed you to. You are a controlled asset of the new world order ... bought and paid for." "Everyone has some skeleton in the cupboard. How else would MI5 and special branch recruit agents?" "Shill, traitor, sleeper", "leftwing gatekeeper", "accessory after the fact", "political whore of the biggest conspiracy of them all".       These are a few of the measured responses to my article, a fortnight ago, about the film Loose Change, which maintains that the United States government destroyed the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Having spent years building up my leftwing credibility on behalf of my paymasters in MI5, I've blown it. I overplayed my hand, and have been exposed, like Bush and Cheney, by a bunch of kids with laptops. My handlers are furious.       I believe that George Bush is surrounded by some of the most scheming, devious, ruthless men to have found their way into government since the days of
 the Borgias. I believe that they were criminally negligent in failing to respond to intelligence about a potential attack by al-Qaida, and that they have sought to disguise their incompetence by classifying crucial documents.       I believe, too, that the Bush government seized the opportunity provided by the attacks to pursue a longstanding plan to invade Iraq and reshape the Middle East, knowing full well that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Bush deliberately misled the American people about the links between 9/11 and Iraq and about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. He is responsible for the murder of many tens of thousands of Iraqis.       But none of this is sufficient. To qualify as a true opponent of the Bush regime, you must also now believe that it is capable of magic. It could blast the Pentagon with a cruise missile while persuading hundreds of onlookers that they saw a plane. It could wire every floor of the twin towers with explosives
 without attracting attention and prime the charges (though planes had ploughed through the middle of the sequence) to drop each tower in a perfectly timed collapse. It could make Flight 93 disappear into thin air, and somehow ensure that the relatives of the passengers collaborated with the deception. It could recruit tens of thousands of conspirators to participate in these great crimes and induce them all to have kept their mouths shut, for ever.       In other words, you must believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their pals are all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful, despite the fact that they were incapable of faking either weapons of mass destruction or any evidence at Ground Zero that Saddam Hussein was responsible. You must believe that the impression of cackhandedness and incompetence they have managed to project since taking office is a front. Otherwise you are a traitor and a spy.       Why do I bother with these morons? Because they are destroying the
 movements some of us have spent a long time trying to build. Those of us who believe that the crucial global issues - climate change, the Iraq war, nuclear proliferation, inequality - are insufficiently debated in parliament or congress, that corporate power stands too heavily on democracy, that war criminals, cheats and liars are not being held to account, have invested our efforts in movements outside the mainstream political process. These, we are now discovering, are peculiarly susceptible to this epidemic of gibberish.       The obvious corollorary to the belief that the Bush administration is all-powerful is that the rest of us are completely powerless. In fact it seems to me that the purpose of the "9/11 truth movement" is to be powerless. The omnipotence of the Bush regime is the coward's fantasy, an excuse for inaction used by those who don't have the stomach to engage in real political fights.       Let me give you an example. The column I wrote about Loose
 Change two weeks ago generated 777 posts on the Guardian Comment is Free website, which is almost a record. Most of them were furious. The response from a producer of the film, published last week, attracted 467. On the same day the Guardian published my article about a genuine, demonstrable conspiracy: a spy network feeding confidential information from an arms control campaign to Britain's biggest weapons manufacturer, BAE Systems. It drew 60 responses. The members of the 9/11 cult weren't interested. If they had been, they might have had to do something. The great virtue of a fake conspiracy is that it calls on you to do nothing.       The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a displacement activity. A displacement activity is something you do because you feel incapable of doing what you ought to do. A squirrel sees a larger squirrel stealing its horde of nuts. Instead of attacking its rival, it sinks its teeth into a tree and starts ripping it to pieces. Faced with the
 mountainous challenge of the real issues we must confront, the chickens in the "truth" movement focus instead on a fairytale, knowing that nothing they do or say will count, knowing that because the perpetrators don't exist, they can't fight back. They demonstrate their courage by repeatedly bayoneting a scarecrow.       Many of those who posted responses on Comment is Free contend that Loose Change (which was neatly demolished in the BBC's film The Conspiracy Files on Sunday night) is a poor representation of the conspiracists' case. They urge us instead to visit websites like 911truth.org, physics911.net and 911scholars.org, and to read articles by the theology professor David Ray Griffin and the physicist Steven E Jones.       Concerned that I might have missed something, I have now done all those things, and have come across exactly the same concatenation of ill-attested nonsense as I saw in Loose Change. In all these cases you will find wild supposition raised to the
 status of incontrovertible fact, rumour and confusion transformed into evidence, selective editing, the citation of fake experts, the dismissal of real ones. Doubtless I will now be told that these are not the true believers: I will need to dive into another vat of tripe to get to the heart of the conspiracy.       The 9/11 truthers remind me of nothing so much as the climate change deniers, cherry-picking their evidence, seizing any excuse for ignoring the arguments of their opponents. Witness the respondents to my Loose Change column who maintain that the magazine Popular Mechanics, which has ripped the demolition theories apart, is a government front. They know this because one of its editors, Benjamin Chertoff, is the brother/nephew/first cousin of the US homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff. (They are, as far as Benjamin can discover, unrelated, but what does he know?)       Like the millenarian fantasies which helped to destroy the Levellers as a political
 force in the mid-17th century, this crazy distraction presents a mortal danger to popular oppositional movements. If I were Bush or Blair, nothing would please me more than to see my opponents making idiots of themselves, while devoting their lives to chasing a phantom. But as a controlled asset of the new world order, I would say that, wouldn't I? It's all part of the plot.       Monbiot.com
   
  

Hal Snyder <hal at drxyzzy.org> wrote:     On Feb 21, 2007, at 7:03 AM, Kevin and Cathy  wrote:

> 9/11 Fantasists Pose a Mortal Danger to Popular Oppositional Campaigns
>
> These conspiracy idiots are a boon for Bush and Blair as they destroy
> the movements some of us have spent years building
>
> by George Monbiot

I have spent considerable time with those whom Monbiot would label 
"idiots" and "morons" and am proud to be among their number. Monbiot 
does not own the trademark on dissent. It comes in many forms and 
this rowdy 9/11 truth rabble does not play by his rules. There is 
much chaff but also much wheat in this field. I see tireless study 
and investigation, a healthy distrust of sanctioned and filtered 
spokespersons, and spirited activism.

To his principle objection that 9/11 dissent draws resources from the 
truly valuable efforts of those oppositional movements which Monbiot 
deems worthy, I offer this response: questioning 9/11 is one of many 
paths to political awakening. You can't study it for long without 
being drawn deeply into study of world affairs, history, geopolitics, 
etc. Along the way a person will even come across work by Monbiot and 
Chomsky and so on, possibly for the first time or at least with 
improved appreciation.

Kurt Nimmo's rebuttal to Monbiot:


George Monbiot’s Sour 9/11 Grapes
Tuesday February 20th 2007, 8:07 pm
  
It stinks of desperation. George Monbiot, inveterate leftist of the 
foundation financed environmentalist persuasion, has once again taken 
a swing at the “conspiracy idiots” who believe government is capable 
of mass murder, including the reflexive murder of its own subjects.

Not unlike his brethren, most notably Noam Chomsky and Alex Cockburn, 
Monbiot buys the Ward Churchill version of events in regard to the 
attacks of September 11, 2001—that is to say Osama and a small number 
of cave-dwelling Wahhabi fanatics magically made NORAD stand down and 
defied the immutable laws of physics, thus delivering one to the 
conclusion a piece of paper cannot be slipped between Monbiot and the 
moonstruck followers of the neocons, as they all buy the same 
Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

“Why do I bother with these morons? Because they are destroying the 
movements some of us have spent a long time trying to build,” 
complains the former BBC employee. “Those of us who believe that the 
crucial global issues—climate change, the Iraq war, nuclear 
proliferation, inequality—are insufficiently debated in parliament or 
congress, that corporate power stands too heavily on democracy, that 
war criminals, cheats and liars are not being held to account, have 
invested our efforts in movements outside the mainstream political 
process. These, we are now discovering, are peculiarly susceptible to 
this epidemic of gibberish.”

In fact, Mr. Monbiot and his ilk are part and parcel of the 
“mainstream political process,” especially considering the degree of 
foundation funding and support his cherished “movements” receive, 
from the likes of the Ford, Schumann, Rockefeller, and MacArthur 
foundations, to name but a handful.

Monbiot’s “progressive” left was long ago sold down the river. In 
effect, the foundation oiled “movements” so dear to Monbiot’s heart 
are completely and utterly ineffectual, having accomplished dreadful 
little over the decades, and instead serve as a facile target of 
convenience for Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michael “Savage” 
Weiner, Sean Hannity and the neocon fascists dominating the corporate 
media.

For all his effort and that of his pals, Monbiot has managed to make 
the machine of progress, as he gauges it, turn in reverse. It is not 
the 9/11 “morons” destroying Mr. Monbiot’s “movements,” but his own 
enervated struggle, his own inability to understand reality and deal 
with it, even as he has made a career out of complaint minus 
substantial result.

According to Monbiot, questioning the official version of events, 
replete with bad science and glaring omission, is “a displacement 
activity” and avoidance “of the real issues we must confront,” never 
mind Monbiot and his fellows have confronted for decade after decade 
“issues” they swear are “real,” only to slide backward down a long 
slope into the muck of irrelevance, made a laughingstock and a 
cavalcade of clowns by the corporate media.

For Monbiot, the documentary Loose Change is a “concatenation of ill- 
attested nonsense,” never mind the good professor, from on-high at 
Oxford Brookes University, does not bother to detail such ill- 
attestation, caring only to tell us Benjamin Chertoff, the “senior 
researcher” of Popular Mechanics tasked with slamming 9/11 research 
far and wide, is not related to Michael Chertoff, a fact disputed by 
none other than Benjamin’s mother, Judy Dargan, in Pelham, New York. 
“Yes, of course, he is a cousin,” she told journalist Christopher 
Bollyn.

Mr. Monbiot is determined to attack the “crazy distraction” that 
supposedly “presents a mortal danger to popular oppositional 
movements,” never mind by and large such movements long ago went to 
fossil precisely because of the inability of intellectual doyens— 
represented by Chomsky, Cockburn, and Monbiot—to accept the fact 
that, indeed, George Bush and the neocons—and yes, even the faceless 
bureaucrats the progressives submit grant applications to over at the 
Ford and Rockefeller foundations—are cold-blooded killers who are 
determined to not only slaughter Iraqis as they did Vietnamese, but 
no small number of innocent office workers on a sunny morning in New 
York as well.

But not to despair, George, there is still time.

If you put aside your petty jealousies and hurt feelings and join the 
9/11 truth movement you claim to despise, we actually may be able to 
effectuate change before it is too late.

Short of that, and the possibility of the unthinkable now breathing 
down our necks, we will know who will share the blame come the day 
after.


































 
   
   
  
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