Gullible Americans
By
Paul Craig Roberts
08/14/06 "Information
Clearing House" -- --
I was in China when a July
Harris Poll reported that 50 percent of Americans still believe
that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when Bush invaded that
country, and that 64 percent of Americans still believe that
Saddam Hussein had strong links with Al Qaeda.
The Chinese leaders and
intellectuals with whom I was meeting were incredulous. How
could a majority of the population in an allegedly free country
with an allegedly free press be so totally misinformed?
The only answer I could give the
Chinese is that Americans would have been the perfect population
for Mao and the Gang of Four, because Americans believe anything
their government tells them.
Americans never check any
facts. Who do you know, for example, who has even read the
Report of the 9/11 Commission, much less checked the alleged
facts reported in that document. I can answer for you. You
don’t know anyone who has read the report or checked the facts.
The two co-chairmen of the 9/11
Commission Report, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, have just
released a new book, “Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the
9/11 Commission.” Kean and Hamilton reveal that the commission
suppressed the fact that Muslim ire toward the US is due to US
support for Israel’s persecution and dispossession of the
Palestinians, not to our “freedom and democracy” as Bush
propagandistically claims. Kean and Hamilton also reveal that
the US military committed perjury and lied about its failure to
intercept the hijacked airliners. The commission even debated
referring the military’s lies to the Justice Department for
criminal investigation. Why should we assume that these
admissions are the only coverups and lies in the 9/11 Commission
Report?
How do you know that 9/11 was a
Muslim terrorist plot? How do you know that three World Trade
Center buildings collapsed because two were hit by airliners?
You only “know” because the government gave you the explanation
of what you saw on TV. (Did you even know that three WTC
buildings collapsed?)
I still remember the
enlightenment I experienced as a student in Russian Studies when
I learned that the Czarist secret police would set off bombs and
then blame those whom they wanted to arrest..
When Hitler seized dictatorial
power in 1933, he told the Germans that his new powers were made
necessary by a communist terrorist attack on the Reichstag.
When Hitler started World War II by invading Poland, he told the
Germans that Poland had crossed the frontier and attacked
Germany.
Governments lie all the
time--especially governments staffed by neoconservatives whose
intellectual godfather, Leo Strauss, taught them that it is
permissible to deceive the public in order to achieve their
agenda.
Some readers will write to me to
say that they saw a TV documentary or read a magazine article
verifying the government’s explanation of 9/11. But, of course,
these Americans did not check the facts either--and neither did
the people who made the documentary and wrote the magazine
article.
Scientists and engineers, such as Clemson University
Professor of Engineering Dr. Judy Woods and BYU Professor of
Physics Dr. Steven Jones, have raised compelling
questions about the official account of the collapse of the
three WTC buildings. The basic problem for the government's
account is that the buildings are known to have fallen at
free fall speed, a fact that is inconsistent with the
government's "pancaking" theory in which debris from above
collapsed the floors below. If the buildings actually "pancaked,"
then each floor below would have offered resistance to the
floors above, and the elapsed time would have been much
longer. These experts have also calculated that the
buildings did not have sufficient gravitational energy to
accommodate the government's theory of the collapse. It is
certainly a known and non-controversial fact among
physicists and engineers that the only way buildings can
collapse at free fall speed into their own footprints is by
engineered demolition. Explosives are used to remove the
support of floors below before the debris from
above arrives. Otherwise, resistance is encountered and the
time required for fall increases. Engineered demolition
also explains the symmetrical collapse of the buildings into
their own foot prints. As it is otherwise improbable for
every point in floors below to weaken uniformly, "pancaking"
would result in asymmetrical collapse as some elements of
the floor would give sooner than others.
Scientific evidence is a tough thing for the American public
to handle, and the government knows it. The government can
rely on people dismissing things that they cannot understand
as "conspiracy theory." But if you are inclined to try to
make up your own mind, you can find Dr. Jones' and Dr.
Woods’ papers, which have been formally presented to their
peers at scientific meetings, on line at
http://www.st911.org/
Experts have also pointed out that the buildings' massive
steel skeletons comprised a massive heat sink that wicked
away the heat from the limited, short-lived fires, thus
preventing a heat buildup. Experts also point out that the
short-lived, scattered, low-intensity fires could barely
reach half the melting point of steel even if they burned
all day instead of merely an hour.
Don't ask me to tell you what happened on 9/11. All I know
is that the official account of the buildings' collapse is
improbable.
Now we are being told another
improbable tale. Muslim terrorists in London and Pakistan were
caught plotting to commit mass murder by smuggling bottles of
explosive liquids on board airliners in hand luggage. Baby
formula, shampoo and water bottles allegedly contained the tools
of suicide bombers.
How do we know about this plot?
Well, the police learned it from an “Islamic militant arrested
near the Afghan-Pakistan border several weeks ago.” And how did
someone so far away know what British-born people in London were
plotting?
Do you really believe that
Western and Israeli intelligence services, which were too
incompetent to prevent the 9/11 attack, can uncover a London
plot by capturing a person on the Afghan border in Pakistan? Why
would “an Islamic militant” rat on such a plot even if he knew
of it?
More probable explanations of
the “plot” are readily available. According to the August 11
Wayne Madsen Report, informed sources in the UK report that “the
Tony Blair government, under siege by a Labor Party revolt,
cleverly cooked up a new ‘terror’ scare to avert the public’s
eyes away from Blair’s increasing political woes. British law
enforcement, neocon and intelligence operatives in the US,
Israel, and Britain, and Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire
cooked up the terrorist plot, liberally borrowing from the
failed 1995 ‘Oplan Bjinka’ plot by Pakistan- and
Philippines-based terrorist Ramzi Ahmad Yousef to crash 11
trans-Pacific airliners bound from Asia to the US.”
There are other plausible
explanations. For example, our puppet in Pakistan decided to
arrest some people who were a threat to him. With Bush’s
commitment to “building democracy in the Middle East,” our
puppet can’t arrest his political enemies without cause, so he
lays the blame on a plot.
Any testimony against Muslim
plotters by “an Islamic militant” is certain to have been bought
and paid for.
Or consider this explanation.
Under the Nuremberg standard, Bush and Blair are war criminals.
Bush is so worried that he will be held accountable that he has
sent his attorney general to consult with the Republican
Congress to work out legislation to protect Bush retroactively
from his violations of the Geneva Conventions.
Tony Blair is in more danger of
finding himself in the dock. Britain is signatory to a treaty
that, if justice is done, will place Blair before the
International Criminal Court in the Hague.
What better justification for
the two war criminals’ illegal actions than the need to foil
dastardly plots by Muslims recruited in sting operations by
Western intelligence services? The more Bush and Blair can
convince their publics that terrorist danger abounds, the less
likely Bush and Blair are ever to be held accountable for their
crimes.
But surely, some readers might
object, our great moral leaders wouldn’t do something political
like that!
They most certainly would. As
Joshua Micah Marshall wrote in the July 7 issue of Time
magazine, the suspicion is “quite reasonable” that “the Bush
Administration orchestrates its terror alerts and arrests to
goose the GOP’s poll numbers.”
Joshua Micah Marshall proves his
conclusion by examining the barrage of color-coded terror
alerts, none of which were real, and, yes, it all fits with
political needs.
And don’t forget the plot
unearthed in Miami to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago.
Described by Vice President Cheney as a “very real threat,” the
plot turned out to be nothing more than a few harmless whackos
recruited by an FBI agent sent out to organize a sting.
There was also the “foiled plot”
to blow up the Holland Tunnel and flood downtown New York City
with sea water. Thinking New Orleans, the FBI invented this
plot without realizing that New York City is above sea level.
Of course, most Americans didn’t realize it either.
For six years the Bush regime
has been able to count on the ignorant and naive American public
to believe whatever tale that is told them. American
gullibility has yet to fail the Bush regime.
The government has an endless
number of conspiracy theories, but only people who question the
government’s conspiracies are derided for “having a conspiracy
theory.”
The implication is even worse if
we assume that the explosive bottle plot is genuine. It means
that America and Britain by their own aggression in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and by enabling Israel’s war crimes in Palestine
and Lebanon, have created such hatred that Muslims, who identify
with Bush’s, Blair’s, and Israel’s victims, are plotting
retaliation.
But Bush is prepared. He has
taught his untutored public that “they hate us for our freedom
and democracy.”
Gentle reader, wise up. The
entire world is laughing at you.
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