- Think, for a moment, about how the events in your
life would sound if they were broadcast over the evening news:
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- "Man Heaves Boiling Pot of Spaghetti at Wall in
Disgust"
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- "Florida Woman Refuses to Clean Family
Bathroom"
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- "Family Reunion Turns Ugly: Father Disowns
Son"
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- If you were the spaghetti-tosser, the recalcitrant
bathroom-cleaner, or the disgruntled family patriarch, you may take
exception to the sound bites chosen by the local news editor to
encapsulate the trials and tribulations of your daily
activities.
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- The reason for this is obvious. You know your own
history. You know the events that led up to, and eventually culminated
in, the aerial noodle launch. You understand the connection of one bad
hair day to the next, and you immediately grasp the proverbial Big
Picture. More importantly, however, you know that the dazed and
confused channel-surfer at the other end of the remote control does
not have access to this information, and worse yet, has only sixty
seconds to make a judgment call about it before the next Rice-a-Roni
commercial.
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- Much has been made over the years of the increasing
tendency toward superficiality in news reporting. While obviously it
is more difficult to simulate in print, both hard copy and broadcast
news alike, have fallen prey to reporting pseudo-news. News anchors
have become 'on-air' personalities, non-news, (such as what to buy
your significant other for the holiday season), gets equal billing
with stories on foreign policy, and the whole mess is packaged in
tiny, out-of-context parcels that are hurled at the consuming public
like a game of dodge-ball played by a frenetic team of speed
freaks.
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- Thus translated, a news clip regarding the case of
the man and the airborne pasta may dig down far enough to find the
cause of whatever it was that triggered his fit of pique. It may even
become the subject of "in-depth team coverage," whereby the public may
learn that this particular incident was not isolated, and the
gentleman in question was, in fact, a serial offender, having tossed a
veritable barrage of spaghetti over the course of a lifetime.
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- What they will not find out, perhaps, is the
relationship between this hot-tempered individual and the woman who
has forever hung up her plunger. And there might just well be one.
Human relationships are complicated things, cutting well across
interstate lines - multi-generational, multi-faceted, and systemic.
And history, being an outgrowth of millions of people interacting
millions of different ways over millions of years, is the same.
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- This is one of the reasons - perhaps the paramount
reason - that government corruption and collusion are so difficult for
a news-consuming public, already wallowing chest deep in factoids, to
accept. The 'talking-head' phenomenon and round-table discussions so
popular in the modern political milieu are well-suited to this
sound-bite drenched media landscape, as they allow the public to
presume that they have just heard the profound truth. The pundits,
pontificating ad nauseum, provide the perception of depth by the sheer
volume of their words - and frequently their voices - without ever
delivering a holistic and "in context" view of current events.
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- Today I watched Michael Ruppert defending his theory
regarding massive government collusion in the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
The other panelists, predictably, were not convinced, and the
arguments they used to refute Mr. Ruppert were the same ones we have
heard repeatedly every time this particular "conspiracy theory" starts
to see daylight. Why were military jets not scrambled to intercept the
hijacked planes? Human error. Why did American intelligence ignore the
warnings from foreign source regarding the impending attacks? Outdated
and bureaucratic organizations that donít talk to each other. How did
a rag-tag bunch of known troublemakers manage to board the doomed
flights in the first place? Lax airport security.
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- A point-by-point refutation of Mr. Ruppert's
argument holds up well on the surface. Why? Because it is just that -
a point-by-point refutation. Any one of these arguments, taken by
itself, makes sense, particularly to a people who are still dumbstruck
and grieving, a people who have been educated, both through the school
system and through daily interaction with their friends and neighbors,
to believe that the Americans are the Good Guys, decent and
benevolent, right-thinking and honest.
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- And most Americans are just that. So when faced with
people who are not that way, it sets up a clamoring of cognitive
dissonance that can be heard from from sea to shining sea. Into that
cacophony of disbelief steps the clean-up crews, the experts and
pundits who emanate from government-sponsored think tanks, and
participate in panel-style discussions such as the one with Mr.
Ruppert. These "experts" are quick with the anecdotal counterpoints -
and they seem pretty believable until ñ and unless - one takes the
time to step back and take a longer view.
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- In an excellent piece entitled, 'Uncle Sam's Lucky
Finds,' published by the Guardian Unlimited on Tuesday, March 18,
2002, Anne Karpf deftly navigates the scattered, pundit-tossed bread
crumbs, and offers an extremely compelling view of American
intelligence propaganda at its finest.
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- For while it is credible to assume that the various
alphabet soup agencies that constitute our national security system
might have missed India, France, and Russia chirping something about
terrorist attacks as early as last spring, it is not credible to argue
that these same agencies - who prior to September 11 could not find
their arse with both hands - had, within weeks of the attacks,
successfully identified all the hijackers. Following a trail of
fortuitously placed flight manuals, Korans, 'terrorist handbooks,'
(and please think about that one for a moment), and most amazingly of
all, an unscathed fragment of Mohammed Atta's passport, the feds moved
swiftly to construct a case implicating royal Saudi bad boy, Osama bin
Laden.
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- It is possible, I suppose, that one of the hijackers
would become careless and leave a flight manual lying around, or that
the hand of some unseen deity would pluck Mr. Atta's smoldering
passport out of the ruins of the WTC, (and then lay it gently at the
feet of an FBI super-sleuth), but taken together, the improbability of
such serendipity rapidly begins to become an impossibility.
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- Due to the enormity of the operation - and perhaps
also due to the Pentagon's budgetary needs - shortly after the event,
the terrorism experts began speculating about how September 11th could
have been planned, financed, and perhaps even rehearsed, without
arousing suspicion. They posited that underground cells of terrorists
had lain hidden in sleepy suburban bedroom communities for perhaps as
long as a decade, flying under the radar and waiting for their
appointed hour to strike.
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- Again, taken by itself, this is a plausible
explanation. But lay these stories next to the ones that tell us of
devout Muslim suicide bombers, (already a contradiction in terms by
the very nature of the religion), preparing for a holy war by making a
trip to Hooters, drinking heavily, and then leaving their apartments
strewn with terrorist paraphernalia. That's when the official version
begins to leak like a used condom. Are we to believe that these
highly-disciplined fanatics who completely escaped detection for
perhaps a decade, threw all caution to the winds in their final hours
and said, 'What the hell? Letís have a beer.'
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- Nevertheless the stories are not placed side-by-side
by the journalistic corps. One day we hear the story of the
miraculously salvaged passport, but it is framed by a sound bite
extolling the virtues of Preparation H, Verizon wireless, and Big
Macs. Two days later and similarly displaced, we learn that while
making a routine search of an abandoned vehicle, the FBI discovers a
trunk-load of bright yellow books labeled, 'Terrorism for Dummies.' In
our busy minds, moving through our busy lives, the two stories are
never connected and hence become plausible.
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- This, then, is why a forum such as the panel
discussion featuring Mr. Ruppert is not as effective as, for instance,
a lecture or a book. And it is why a point-by-point rebuttal of the
9-11 "conspiracy theory" rings righteous to those who want so
desperately to believe they are governed by fundamentally decent human
beings. Taken individually, points a, b, and c may be dismissed as
paranoid nonsense, but it is only when they are laid end to end and
the connecting lines are drawn, that an arrangement emerges, making it
possible to see not only the relationship between point a and point b,
but the one between point a and point c as well.
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- History, you see, is systemic, not anecdotal.
Current events, as reported by the modern media, whether through
deliberate propaganda or just sloppy journalism, are quite the
opposite. Being systemic, the larger the historical event, the more
touch points there are to other events. The more complex the system,
the more necessary it is that the informed observer not mistake an
individual cell for the entire organism. In the end, when confronted
with a unified theory such as the one proposed by Michael Ruppert, one
must not succumb to the temptation to take the event out of context.
The pile of noodles did not, after all, get there by itself. Someone
had to throw the pot, and someone had to piss off the
pot-thrower.
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- Murderous government corruption is nothing new. The
arguments set forth by Mr. Ruppert and others who have the ability to
see beyond the firestorm of factoids, are neither illogical -
particularly when viewed in their totality - nor, unfortunately,
without precedent in the history of the United States. The evidence to
support similar events is well-documented in the records of
administrations past, yet it only takes a talented sophist to refute
an individual point. And, as we know all too well, the media has no
want of those. Who, after all, has the time to research all the
details themselves? Much easier to let Biff, the square-jawed anchor
man tell you what happened, and then allow Bob, the high-brow expert,
tell you how to think about it.
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- Historical events are no different than the ones
that make up your own life. The only way they can be understood is in
relationship to each other, and in the context of what has come
before. So stop and think, the next time you are tempted to reject a
conspiracy theory out of hand, how your life would play on the eleven
oí clock news. Tell me if those disjointed fragments that constitute
your life story would be fairly and accurately reflected in one
hundred words or less, particularly when preceded by a zippy,
attention-grabbing leader, and followed by a blaring advertisement
extolling the virtues of softer bathroom tissue. And then tell me if
you still accept the official explanation about what happened on
September 11, 2001.
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