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The 9/11 Servility Reflex
James Bovard
Lew
Rockwell.com
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Many citizens react to their rulers like little kids who recognize
that a stranger is acting suspiciously and may be up to no good
– but then decide whether to trust the man depending on
the type of candy he pulls from his pockets. It is as if a Reese’s
Peanut Butter Cup trumps the beady eyes, sweaty forehead, and
out-of-season trench coat. Likewise, adults may be wary about
a politician – but if the guy promises free prescription
drugs or protection and safety, many take the bait.
The naïve response to politicians triumphed in the weeks
after the 9/11 attacks. By the end of September 2001, almost two-thirds
of Americans said they “trust the government in Washington
to do what is right” either “just about always”
or “most of the time.” Amazingly, the attacks even
boosted Americans’ confidence that government would protect
them against terrorists.
Many of the most respected and prominent media commentators saw
9/11 as the great sanctifier of government power. The New York
Times’s R.W. Apple announced, “Government is back
in style.” Wall Street Journal columnist Al Hunt proclaimed,
“It’s time to declare a moratorium on government-bashing.”
Los Angeles Times columnist Ronald Brownstein declared on September
19, “At the moment the first fireball seared the crystalline
Manhattan sky last week, the entire impulse to distrust government
that has become so central to U.S. politics seemed instantly anachronistic.”
Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam effused,
I think there is the potential that September 11 will turn
out to be a turning point for civic America.... There could
be some good coming from it if it causes us to become ... more
open-minded about the role of government.
(Article continues below)
The 9/11 attacks produced many such summonses to elevate and
glorify government. Yet it was U.S. government foreign policies
that stirred up the hornets’ nest, breeding hatred that
led to the attacks themselves. After two skyscrapers collapse
and the Pentagon is in flames, the government is hailed for failing
to protect Americans from the enemies its policies helped create.
The 9/11 attackers were mass murderers who had no right to kill
Americans. But to pretend that the attacks originated out of nowhere
or out of hatred for freedom fraudulently exonerates the U.S.
government.
The Bush administration did all it could to exploit 9/11 to promote
presidential and governmental greatness. However, a 2002 Senate
Intelligence Committee investigation found a vast array of federal-intelligence
and law-enforcement failures prior to the attack. Because the
Bush administration often stonewalled the Senate investigation,
9/11 widows and widowers pressured Congress to create an independent
commission to investigate the attacks. Bush and Republican and
Democratic congressional leaders stacked the commission with former
congressmen, high-ranking government officials, and others entwined
in the Washington establishment. Beverly Eckert, a 9/11 widow
and activist, complained, “We wanted journalists, we wanted
academics.... We did not want politicians.”
Philip Zelikow was appointed executive director of the commission.
Zelikow, the co-editor of a Harvard study entitled Why People
Don’t Trust Government, had worked closely with National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and had co-authored a book with
her in 1999. He had also been in charge of the Bush White House
transition team on national security matters, had been involved
in numerous transition briefings on the subject of terrorism,
and was called as a witness before the commission. He recused
himself from the commission hearing at which Rice testified. She
was the one government official who perhaps most deserved perjury
charges from her testimony, yet there was not a single word of
criticism of her in the commission’s final report.
The 9/11 report
The 9/11 Commission became the Bush administration’s most
famous faith-based initiative. The commission appeared far more
concerned with restoring trust than in revealing truth. Bush and
Cheney were allowed to testify without a transcript and not under
oath. Americans never heard what they said. Instead, the commission
offered a synopsis of their comments – as if it would have
been impious to quote them directly. The White House was allowed
to edit the final version of the commission’s report before
it was publicly released.
The commission’s final 568-page report quickly became a
bestseller, widely praised in part because it assiduously avoided
judgment. There was no mention in the final report of how Bush
and Cheney exploited falsehoods about 9/11 to lead the nation
to war against Iraq. But, as Amherst professor Benjamin DeMott
noted in Harper’s, the report was useless to historians
because of a “seeming terror of bias.” He was especially
appalled that the commission accepted without challenge Bush’s
assertion that the August 6, 2001, President’s Daily Brief
was “historical in nature.” DeMott observed, “There’s
little mystery about why the Commission is tongue-tied. It can’t
call a liar a liar.” He noted,
The ideal readers of The 9/11 Commission Report are those who
resemble the Commission itself in believing that a strong inclination
to trust the word of highly placed others is evidence of personal
moral distinction.
The 9/11 Commission report provided a litany of government missteps
while carefully avoiding raising any ire against the government.
The failures often appeared to be more acts of God than failings
by specific identifiable individuals. It strived for a balance
of criticism between the current and prior administrations and
between the two political parties. Thus, there was nothing to
be done except count our blessings, celebrate our two-party system,
and go whip the terrorists.
The 9/11 Commission also compiled ample evidence of government
lying. Yet the commission effectively ignored or “rose above”
all the falsehoods. There was no sense that the lies of the most
powerful officials in the land posed any threat to America. Instead,
there were “communication problems” between government
agencies.
The mainstream press
The establishment aided the government by heaping derision on
nonbelievers. The Washington Post, in an October 2004 article
headlined “Conspiracy Theories Flourish on the Internet,”
examined the problems of those who had not accepted the government’s
latest version of 9/11. The Post noted sympathetically,
The ready and growing audience for conspiracy theories about
the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been particularly galling to
those who worked on ... the bipartisan panel known as the 9/11
commission.
In Washington, “bipartisan” is the ultimate test
of credibility – as if there is no chance that the two
parties would ever conspire against the truth. Zelikow bemoaned,
We discussed the theories. When we wrote the report, we were
also careful not to answer all the theories. It’s like playing
Whack-A-Mole. You’re never going to whack them all. They
satisfy a deep need in the people who create them.
The Post turned to a Syracuse University political scientist,
Michael Barkun, for psychological insights into nonbelievers:
Conspiracy theories are ... usually wrong, but they’re
psychologically reassuring. Because what they say is that everything
is connected, nothing happens by accident, and that there is
some kind of order in the world, even if it’s produced
by evil forces.
The Post never ran any articles on the psychological maladies
of people who insisted on believing the government’s statements
on 9/11 despite the contradictions or who insisted on clinging
to earlier government claims after the government revised the
facts.
Zelikow, who was hired by Rice as her top counsel at the State
Department a few months after the Post article appeared, commented,
The hardcore conspiracy theorists are totally committed.... That’s
not our worry. Our worry is when things become infectious, as
happened with the [John F. Kennedy] assassination. Then this stuff
can be deeply corrosive to public understanding. You can get where
the bacteria can sicken the larger body.
(If the government was so forthright in its investigation of the
Kennedy assassination, why were the Warren Commission records
sealed for 75 years?)
Not a single one of the top 300 American newspapers or magazines
archived on the LexisNexis database commented on Zelikow’s
“bacteria” and “infectious” characterization
of disbelief in the government’s version of 9/11. Yet his
comment sounded as if the 9/11 Commission saw itself as America’s
mental-health czar. Private doubts are the bacteria, and government
assertions are presumably the disinfectant. As long as people
believe what the government says, no one will get sick.
Some of the allegations regarding 9/11 – such as the charge
that no plane had hit the Pentagon – were easily verifiable
as false. New American, the magazine of the John Birch Society,
ran an article harshly criticizing some of the 9/11 conspiracy
theories, though carefully avoiding embracing the government.
Yet, as with Waco, the Establishment invoked outlying loons in
order to seek to undermine the credibility of all criticism of
the government. But the existence of conspiracy nuts does not
make the government honest.
The Washington Post never portrayed government officials who
put out false statements about 9/11 in the same light as it did
the private conspiracy buffs. Despite the fact that private citizens
have no power over other Americans and that they have no authority
to coerce them or drag them into an unnecessary war, their false
statements are presented as a greater threat than those of government
officials. The obsession with private lies is misplaced, when
the real danger is the government lie – a lie embraced and
disseminated by a subservient media, vested with all the prestige
and aura of the state, and protected by an iron curtain of government
secrecy. And regardless of how many times the government changes
the official story, people who continue to distrust the government
are delirious.
The government’s appearing to be a necessary evil does
not oblige people to trust it. We face a choice of trusting government
or trusting freedom – trusting overlords who have lied and
abused their power or trusting individuals to make the most of
their own lives.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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