President Biden yesterday signed an executive order ordering federal agencies to review and declassify an unspecified amount of documents related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
HERE is the Washington Post story by Amy B. Wang as it appeared in the Anchorage Daily News. HERE is the New York Times story by Annie Karni as it appeared on bdnews24.com.
The order was a breakthrough of sorts, but not all documents are necessarily to be released. One of the agencies, the Justice Department, is to review and release selected documents over the next six months.
As recounted HERE, nearly a month ago families of 9/11 victims and others told the president to stay away from 20th anniversary events unless he ordered documents declassified. In 2018 the U.S. Senate approved a resolution without objection calling for declassification of all documents related to the September 2001 attacks; for details click HERE and scroll down.
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Two of this country’s oldest magazines have been handling “9/11” differently. The Atlantic’s September issue has a long cover piece by Jennifer Senior, “Twenty Years Gone: One Family’s struggle to make sense of 9/11.” family is that of Bobby McIlvaine, 26, who died in the first of the Twin Towers to collapse.
Larger truths of 9/11 are avoided in the 15-page up-close-and-personal examination of the anguish and other emotions of this one victim’s family, friends, fiancée, neighbors, schoolmates, teammates /and a former coach as they remember him and have grappled with his loss over 20 years.
One of many paragraphs focusing on the young man’s father:
“Crucial to Bob Sr.’s understanding of September 11—that it was the cynical skulduggery of the U.S. government, not a grisly act of terrorism by jihadists using commercial planes filled with helpless civilians—is the work of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which popularized the idea that jet fuel couldn’t burn at a high enough temperature to melt beams into molten steel. This is, it should go without saying, contrary to all observable fact.”
Some will see disinformation in that by Senior, who doesn’t elaborate on “all observable fact.”
Disinformation is the topic of Harper’s September issue cover piece, “Disinformed: How We Get Fake News Wrong,” by Joseph Bernstein, which does not mention 9/11 or get into what news consumers are to do with news managers’ decisions to leave out inconvenient information. HERE it is for Harper’s subscribers.
Click HERE for Aldous Huxley’s 1936 look at propaganda, “In the Dark,” in the September Harper’s. In less than a page it says a lot about how Americans and the world have been misled about 9/11, although the author of Brave New World could only guess what might be in store that long ago.
A couple of passages:
“Advertisers claim to know accurately enough the potentialities and limitations of different kinds of propaganda—what you can do, for example, by mere statement and repetition; by appeals to such well-organized sentiments as snobbery and the urge toward social conformity; by playing on the animal instincts such as greed, lust, and especially fear in all its forms, from the fear of sickness and death to the fear of being ugly or absurd to one’s fellows.”
and
”[P]ropaganda is most influential when it is a rationalization of the desires, sentiments, prejudices, or interests of those to whom it is addressed.”
— Mark Channing Miller