“We didn’t start this war,” the top editorial in today’s Springfield Republican says about the Afghanistan war. (Emphasis on the first-person plural pronoun added.)

If “we” didn’t, who did?

Why, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Of course Afghanistan did. Specifically, the Taliban did, by hiding Osama bin Laden and his gang.

It says right here: “The al-Qaeda hijackers, under the direction of Osama bin Laden, had trained in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Thus, our response, which began on Oct. 7, 2001.” (Emphasis added.)

“On Sept. 10, 2001, there were few in our nation that gave Afghanistan much thought,” the editorial writer recalls. “A good many, perhaps, couldn’t even have pointed it out on an unlabeled map.” (Emphasis added.)

The editorial doesn’t mention that the Afghanistan war was the first in a string, “but leaving it unfinished, with the nightmare sure to follow, is not a viable option.”

The editorial doesn’t mention that members of al-Qaeda were actually Saudis rather than Afghanis.

The editorial doesn’t mention that Pakistanis could have been useful in finding the al-Qaeda suspects — if indeed “we” wanted to find them.

The editorial doesn’t mention any counter-narrative reporting on the capture and killing in 2011 of someone captured in Pakistan in a Navy Seals operation reputed to have been Osama bin Laden, who reportedly had been living there for years. (Well, Seymour Hersh didn’t win any prizes for the 10,000-word report headlined “The Killing of Osama bin Laden” in a May 2015 issue of the London Review of Books. It’s well worth looking up, though.)

The editorial doesn’t mention that the alleged box-cutter-wielding al-Qaeda operatives who — barely able to fly any airplane — allegedly managed on Sept. 11, 2001, to take over four airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, and, outcrafting civil and military professionals, fly them into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers and a side of the Pentagon, killing thousands and causing the Towers and a third WTC skyscraper, Building 7) to neatly collapse into their own three footprints.

The editorial doesn’t mention that the Taliban were formed and trained and equipped in the 1980s in a joint U.S.-Pakistani-Saudi effort to get Soviet forces out of Afghanistan, end Soviet influence there, and help end the Soviet Union itself.

The editorial doesn’t mention any number of inconvenient facts that would conflict with the Executive Branch / mainstream media narrative.

It does start with a paragraph design to enlist readers’ allegiance: “WITHOUT A DEADLINE,” it begins, “A NATION THAT gets itself involved in a military conflict, especially one that’s being waged in some far-flung land, can end up finding itself fighting endless wars. And nobody wants that, right?”

No matter that “deadline” is primarily a newspaper word, and that governments don’t announce deadlines when entering wars. So the very first sentence is a distraction.

Nevertheless, the editorial continues, “that’s the thinking of many people, left and right, who would like to see the U.S. military less involved in overseas battles. And, although the argument would seem to hold water, at least in theory, in many cases it tends to fall to pieces upon consideration of the specifics.”

The editorial feigns understanding of the ignorance and therefore lack of understanding by “many people” who are inconsiderate of specifics.

It then launches patiently into an explanation of why, in the words of its headline (in the Republican’s print edition), “Finishing job isn’t fighting endless war.” The editorial does so with the help of the first-person plural (“we,” “our” or “us”) 17 times, at least once in each remaining paragraph.

We’re all in this together — you, me, people who read Us, people who read People, people who watch “Oprah,” Oprah herself, people who read Foreign Affairs, the editorial writer himself or herself. We’re interested in certain specifics, but not others.

— Mark Channing Miller

Last Thursday President Biden, standing at a lectern at the White House, spoke to the nation. Here is some of what he said:

“Look, do you know what we have to do … ? Tell the truth. Follow the science. Work together. Put your trust and faith in our government to fill its most important function, which is: protect the American people. No function is more important. We need to remember the government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital ….”

“Last summer I was in Philadelphia, and I met a small-business owner, a woman. I asked her, I said, ‘What do you need most?’ I’ll never forget what she said to me. She said, looking me in the eye, she said, ‘I just want the truth. The truth. Just tell me the truth.’ Think of it. My fellow Americans, you’re owed nothing less than the truth.”

“It’s never, ever, a good bet to bet against the American people.”

*

Actually, the president’s complete first sentence above was “Look, do you know what we have to do to beat this virus?”

The address was about the virus. The virus dominates the news and many people’s consciousness in the United States and elsewhere. It is effectively erasing much of what has gone before, the way the Trump presidency did before it ended, with a big push from the virus.

— Mark Channing Miller

The Chief Speaks: Yesterday’s editions of the Springfield Republican (and masslive.com) carried Holyoke Police Chief Manuel Fero’s response to Officer Rafael Roca’s 43-minute YouTube soliloquy accusing the department of corruption and racism. Subscribers can read it HERE. Chief Fero deals specifically with four of the allegations and refutes them. The whole (so-far) four-part episode is notable for its showcasing the future of communications in this era of Internet access. The four parts are Roca’s Internet speech itself, his being placed on administrative leave for not taking it down, the newspaper’s publishing a story on it, and the chief’s refutations in a second news story of some of Roca’s assertions. This blog mentioned the first two parts HERE.

That’s the Way the Paper Crumples: On Tuesday, atop page D1 of the New York Times’s weekly Science section a story inside was teased with the words “Why does paper crumple the way it does? ‘Geometric frustration.’ ” (The story originated with a study by several Harvard Ph.D candidates on paper crumpling. The study’s lead author, Jovana Andrejevic, a student in applied physics, and her colleagues “delved into fragmentation theory, the principles explaining how materials like rocks break into smaller pieces.” She is pictured in one of nine illustrations.) Perhaps at Harvard and MIT scholars are already tackling the physics, and chemistry, of how the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers and Building 7 on Sept. 11, 2001, collapsed into their own footprints, pretty much identically, two of them reportedly having been flown into by hijacked airliners loaded with jet fuel (kerosene).

‘Centrist’ Is New Attorney General: Former federal Appeals Court Judge Merrick Garland yesterday began his first full day as U.S. attorney general, having been confirmed in a 70-30 Senate vote Wednesday. He is best known as President Obama’s 2016 nominee for a Supreme Court seat whose nomination was blocked by then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The New York Times story by Kate Benner notes up top that “the former prosecutor and widely respected federal judge [has] the task of leading the Justice Department at a time when the nation faces domestic extremist threats and a reckoning over civil rights.” Near the end of Benner’s report is that as a deputy to a deputy attorney general in the Clinton Administration he “oversaw the investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing which led to the conviction and execution of Timothy McVeigh”; that and his supervision of “high-profile cases” including that of Unabomber Ted Katzynski and the Atlanta Olympics bombing ”helped cement Judge Garland’s reputation as a fair-minded centrist.”

Edward Curtin Writes: This has been a good year so far for blogger/author and former sociology professor Edward Curtin (not that 2020, in which his Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies: Critical & Lyrical Essasys was published, wasn’t). Specifically, two of his 2021 entries are well worth one’s time and follow-up reading of books recommended. Chronologically, they are “JFK, Allen Dulles and Indonesia” and “Opening the CIA’s Can of Worms.” As with some of the best essays by educators who can write, each is an engaging course syllabus for a previously little explored field of study. Their topics are little explored because too often the entire spectrum of the media labor mightily to keep them that way. (One lapse was the 1982 movie “The Year of Living Dangerously,” in which viewers were introduced to the notion that there was a country called Indonesia, much less a coup there that installed someone named Suharto.) The first essay is a review of JFK vs. Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia, by historian Greg Poulgrain (Skyhorse Publishing). Another day (or two) I may try to do justice to both of them.

Andrew Bacevch Writes: Andrew Bacevich is, among other things, a retired Boston Univeristy professor, author of 11 books, and president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, whose writings, like Curtin’s, deservedly crop up on various websites. His latest is titled, on Consortium News, “The Blob Insists on Clinging to an Obsolete Past.” The Blob, in this case, is the Biden administration with its seeming determination to sanctify a 20th century way of conducting foreign policy two decades into the 21st.

— Mark Channing Miller

 

HERE is a live Zoom presentation from last December titled  “Fascinating Forgotten Facts About 9/11.”

In the two-part, 97-minute program, psychologist Fran Shur and physics teacher David Chandler host researcher Mike Berger, who responds to questions and comments from them and others.

Some years ago, Berger says, he sold his plastics recycling business to devote more time to exploring the mysterious world of “9/11” and the challenges of getting to the bottom of it. He introduces his talk as follows:

“There has never been a shortage of solid evidence that contradicts the government narrative about what happened leading up to and on 9/11. Fran Shure has written extensively about the psychological resistance to ‘hearing’ the 9/11 false flag evidence. Furthermore, even when presenting a simplified outline of the evidence, we tend to re-energize unconscious 9/11-related trauma, especially for those of us who lived through that day. … I will attempt to present a truth-telling narrative that empowers, rather than invalidates, our ability to make sense of our world, to make the world a better place, and to be change agents.”

The program is cosponsored by Colorado 9/11 Truth and 911truth.org.

 

Rafael Roca is a Holyoke, Massachusetts, police officer who has been placed on administrative leave for relating on YouTube allegations of corruption and systemic racism in his department. The Video is HERE.

A news story in this morning’s Springfield Republican, by reporter Stephanie Barry, is HERE. (Only subscribers can read it online, as the newspaper would like to stay in business, but there may be copies of today’s paper still on newsstands.)

I just posted the video on Facebook. The officer makes a factual error or three in his 40-plus-minute presentation, but overall it rings true. I don’t want to spoil it for readers of this blog by going into any more detail here.

What is this doing in a blog principally about falsehoods by the Executive Branch of the federal government concerning the September 2001 terrorist attacks — covered up by servile news media outlets abetted by sheepish politicians everywhere? Everything.

Either Roca is one of the slickest conmen in the Republic, or this is just the start of something new.

— Mark Channing Miller

Everything below the three dashes is today’s reflection from the Center for Action and Contemplation. The parts in italics are by Richard Rohr. The other parts are by Brian McLaren. For the original including footnotes, click HERE. Some readers may see a similarity in the description of one kind of bias to an observation of Upton Sinclair’s. — MCM

–   –   –

By Richard Rohr and Brian McLaren

CAC faculty member Brian McLaren has done thoughtful and helpful research about what makes us see things so differently from one another. He identified thirteen biases that we outline today. Being a former pastor and an excellent communicator, Brian found a way to make these complex ways of seeing simple and memorable. He writes:

People can’t see what they can’t see. Their biases get in the way, surrounding them like a high wall, trapping them in ignorance, deception, and illusion. No amount of reasoning and argument will get through to them, unless we first learn how to break down the walls of bias. . . .

Confirmation Bias: We judge new ideas based on the ease with which they fit in with and confirm the only standard we have: old ideas, old information, and trusted authorities. As a result, our framing story, belief system, or paradigm excludes whatever doesn’t fit.

Complexity Bias: Our brains prefer a simple falsehood to a complex truth.

Community Bias: It’s almost impossible to see what our community doesn’t, can’t, or won’t see.

Complementarity Bias: If you are hostile to my ideas, I’ll be hostile to yours. If you are curious and respectful toward my ideas, I’ll respond in kind.

Competency Bias: We don’t know how much (or little) we know because we don’t know how much (or little) others know. In other words, incompetent people assume that most other people are about as incompetent as they are. As a result, they underestimate their [own] incompetence, and consider themselves at least of average competence.

Consciousness Bias: Some things simply can’t be seen from where I am right now. But if I keep growing, maturing, and developing, someday I will be able to see what is now inaccessible to me.

Comfort or Complacency Bias: I prefer not to have my comfort disturbed.

Conservative/Liberal Bias: I lean toward nurturing fairness and kindness, or towards strictly enforcing purity, loyalty, liberty, and authority, as an expression of my political identity.

Confidence Bias: I am attracted to confidence, even if it is false. I often prefer the bold lie to the hesitant truth.

Catastrophe or Normalcy Bias: I remember dramatic catastrophes but don’t notice gradual decline (or improvement).

Contact Bias: When I don’t have intense and sustained personal contact with “the other,” my prejudices and false assumptions go unchallenged.

Cash Bias: It’s hard for me to see something when my way of making a living requires me not to see it.

Conspiracy Bias: Under stress or shame, our brains are attracted to stories that relieve us, exonerate us, or portray us as innocent victims of malicious conspirators. [1]

Richard again: I don’t know any other way to be free of all these biases except through the contemplative mind. I see almost every one of them within myself–at least at some point in my life. I also believe there are enough good-willed people out there who, if presented with a list of these biases, have the freedom to investigate, “How can I let go of that? How can I move beyond that?” [2]

A Conversation about Educating Members

Andy Steele of 9/11 Freefall Radio and 911freefall.com talks with Ted Walter of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, HERE or HERE, for half an hour about a new push to educate every member of Congress, and a good many staff members, about the destruction of Building 7 at the World Trade Center on the same day in September 2001 that the Twin Towers were similarly destroyed, the latter being struck by planes.

This is part of AE911Truth’s due diligence, particularly every two years when there has been some turnover in the House and Senate. But as mentioned in the last entry, this year the organization has a DVD of the documentary “SEVEN” that it’s trying to get into the hands of as many members of Congress as possible, each copy arriving in the mail with a cover letter signed by the constituent who sent it.

As Walter puts it, these officeholders should “get on the right side of history.”

His colleague Steele agrees: “I think society is becoming more susceptible to recognizing certain truths.”

It didn’t hurt that last June, while the film was still in production, PBS affiliates across the United States began airing a five-minute version of it for awhile between other shows in its “Spotlight On” series. Essentially the showings were paid ads for it, made possible by donors to AE911Truth.

“SEVEN” stars University of Alaska Fairbanks professor emeritus J. Leroy Hulsey, who led a four-year study of the destruction of Building 7. It was directed by Dylan Avery of the “Loose Change” documentaries, and is narrated by the actor Ed Asher.

 

. . . From You

Some elected officials, and even unelected ones, have a way of looking mystified when asked if they don’t see something fishy about the official explanations about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which killed thousands of people and started a string of wars. Then they might immediately end the conversation.

Few of them want to go on record as doubting the absurd narratives pinning all the blame on America-hating Muslim extremists. (It may have something to do with keeping their jobs.)

Well, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth has come up with a way to help. Simply send — by Monday, March 1 — $20 online to AE911TRUTH along with your address. The people there will send you three DVDs of the documentary “SEVEN” to mail to your U.S. rep and your two U.S. senators, accompanied by a letter with your signature.

Click HERE to see how AE911TRUTH puts it.

At the very least, a staffer or three in each of the offices of these members of Congress may look at “SEVEN,” talk about it with others, and ask their boss about it.

You have to have the $20 and an estimated $10 in your mailing costs and the time and inclination to do your part to end this fraud that is so demeaning to everyone who is a part of it — people in Congress and people everywhere.

Please consider doing this. Thank you.

— Mark Channing Miller

 

Nothing in the newspapers today, Feb. 22, that I’ve seen so far has anything directly to do with the government’s coverup of pertinent facts about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks (or the Anthrax attacks that same month). 

That has pretty much been the case for the last 18 or 19 years. In the first few months after “9/11” journalists did some good digging and reporting on it and actually got paid for it. Then a cloak of omertà seems (in retrospect) to have fallen over the whole thing as the official narratives took over in the effort wipe out any possibility of figuring out what happened—notably including defending the nonsense explanation provided by NIST (the National Institute for Science and Technology) about the collapses of Buildings 1, 2 and 7 at the World Trade Center—not to say the news media have done any better with other aspects of the attacks (in the last 18 or 19 years). 

Mum’s the word.

But every day something in the news reminds one of the value of staying on the case, “one” here meaning someone afflicted with the mental illness of thinking that what actually happened in “9/11” matters, including all the whos, whys, hows, whens and whats.

Take this headline which fills most of the cover of today’s New York Daily News: “NOT READY FOR CRIME TIME: City Hall hopefuls eager to fix NYPD now speak up on curbing street crime.” 

I haven’t read the story (you can read it HERE), but the blaring headline reminded me of Frank Serpico. He is the former New York City whistleblowing cop featured in the 1973 movie “Serpico” based on the biography of him (also 1973) by Peter Maas (1929-2001). Readers of this who have not heard of Serpico or Maas have a big treat in store. (I’ve only just started reading Maas, several of whose other books have been adapted for the big screen.)

Serpico retired from the NYPD after nine years and left the country. HERE is the Official Frank Serpico Blog, which goes up to 2013. HERE is a portrait of him.

The headline reminded me in turn of a story in the Springfield (Mass.) Republican the other day headed, gently, “Council’s input on police reform welcomed: 5 panel members urge DOJ to issue consent decree,” by Peter Goonan. First paragraph: “The U.S. Department of Justice says it welcomes input from the City Council as it negotiates allegations of systematic civil rights violations by the Springfield Police Department Narcotics Bureau.” You can look it up.

I haven’t really started reading today’s New York Times, but as I was jotting down the words of the Daily News headline in a margin of p. D7 of the Times, I came across probably the most important reporting in today’s issue, an obituary headlined “Dianna Ortiz, American Nun Who Was Tortured in Guatemala, Dies at 62.” The headline over the reporting by Katharine Q. Seelye is an understatement, and naturally in an obituary she couldn’t go into the reasons why in any depth. But I’m grateful for the layout that included two photos of Ortiz; it helped some Times readers from turning the page before reading the obituary.

Some of them may decide to read a 2002 book Ortiz authored with the help of Patricia Davis, The Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth. “Sister Ortiz’s book,” Seelye writes, “recounted the psychological toll that both her abduction and her quest for the truth had taken on her.

“And at some point, her friends said, she realized that she had to stop, for her own sanity.”

If you’re not a Times subscriber you may not be able to read the story on p. D7, but perhaps know someone who is an can download and copy it and send it to you. 

I hadn’t read more than three or four paragraphs before recalling the effect Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, the 1982 book by Stephen Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger, had on me. I eventually spent some time in Latin America. So I feel a certain kinship with Ortiz, who in all likelihood had read Bitter Fruit and may have had the course of her life changed by it.

Nothing after the first three paragraphs above seems to have anything even tangentially to do with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but it all does, and not just tangentially. It has to do with the nature of news gathering, what barriers get thrown up in the way of reporters going after a story, what kind of stories advertisers and “underwriters” of news operations will want to pay for the publication of, and what other pressures publishers and managers at news operations are up against.

–   –   –

Someone told me about a Wall Street Journal piece published last Sept. 12 on the September 2001 terrorist attacks, so I looked it up. (Not being a Journal subscriber, I could read only the first part online.) Headline: “9/11 and the Rise of the New Conspiracy Theorists.” Subhead: “The persistence of the fringe movement that blames the U.S. government for the 2001 terrorist attacks suggests that QAnon and other digital-age conspiracists may be around for a while.”

You get the picture. Author is an up and coming “journalist, historian and speaker” whose recent book on “9/11” was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-seller. He’s headed for a Pulitzer if he hasn’t already won one.

–   –   –

At the foot of page D7 in today’s Times are eight or ten paid death notices. One of them says the deceased was “loved by all.”

Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth is pushing DVDs of the documentary “SEVEN.” Deadline for the specials offer (it’s also a fundraising gimmick) is tomorrow, Sunday, Feb. 21.

You know “SEVEN.” It stars J. Leroy Hulsey, currently professor emeritus of structural engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and an impressive supporting cast.

Click HERE for the link to AE911Truth’s offer.

The title comes from the World Trade Center’s Building 7, which although unlike the Twin Towers it was not reported to have been struck by an airliner it came down in its own footprint on Sept. 11, 2001, as if its collapse were done professionally by controlled demolition.

The film was directed by Dylan Avery of “Loose Change” fame. It is narrated by the actor Ed Asher.

HERE is a review of it by Kevin Ryan for The Alethos News.