Document:Domestic Covert Ops for Socialists and Progressives
open letter by Michael B Green to Patrick Martin dated 2010-03-13Subjects: 9-11
Source: 9-11 Research (Link)
Patrick Martin of www.wsws.org wrote:
. . . Such a record [as Obama's] can be defended as "progressive" only on the basis of the complacent perspective of upper-middle-class liberals who are indifferent to the colossal impact of the economic crisis on working people and bloody destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan. (The liberals' lament: What's wrong with Obama?)
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Domestic Covert Ops for Socialists and Progressives
Contradictions for Socialists, Progressives & Domestic Covert Ops
Dear Patrick:
RE: Progressives & Domestic Covert Ops
On February 27, 2009 I attended a fundraiser in a comfortably outfitted Mar Vista, California home for Marcy Winograd, the progressive candidate challenging blue-dog Democrat Jane Harman for the 36th congressional district. Marcy gave a stirring anti-war speech in which she promised to reach out to developing countries, not to make war against them, but to "make progress together" with them. During the Q&A I was silent until the inevitable, "any others?"
"It's a longish question," I began, "so bear with me. The last politician who publicly espoused the goal of mutual economic progress with developing countries was John F. Kennedy — the Alliance for Progress. It enraged and infuriated the right-wing of this country because the United States, and the Western world generally, operates as a vast enterprise of coercive extraction against the interests of what is called the "developing world" but that is in fact the exploited countries of the world. I happen to be wearing Hanes underwear, which I consider a bargain at $1/pair, made in Haiti. And it is a bargain, because some Haitian woman has the choice of starving on the streets or making $0.14/hour in a sweatshop. I buy my Chiquita bananas at Trader Joes for $0.19 a piece, also a bargain at prices kept low by privatized death squads throughout Central America that enjoy the support of Attorney General Eric Holder who used his DOJ connections to give Chiquita executives a free pass for their funding a terrorist organization that murdered union workers. I have watched the DVD's 'Life and Debt' about the IMF's destruction of the Jamaican economy to steal their resources and keep labor costs to a bare subsistence, and watched the John Perkins DVD on Globalization ('Speaking Freely,' Volume 1) detailing how little wars are waged against such countries to keep their rulers in the U.S. pocket at the expense of their people to the benefit of the U.S. economy. So would you be kind enough to explain how it is possible for the U.S. and the countries it exploits to march forward together in 'mutual progress'?"
Marcy, whom I consider the best of the best of persons and political candidates, thanked me for asking the question. She said clearly that she would support unions here and, a little less clearly, abroad, but she never answered the question because it cannot be answered within the framework of conventional politics. Another man raised his hand and said, referring to me, "I agree with you completely, that's how it is, but the fact that we can't change everything, doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to change the things that we can change." I responded, with low-key effrontery, "You mean, I take it, to at least get our share of the spoils?" To my great surprise, from a corner of the room a person I did not identify spoke up and said, "That's right." And then we moved on to canapés. I am not from Marcy's district and was not known to those people, but during the next hour four of them independently came up to me and thanked me for asking such a good question.
I will be more impressed with international socialism when it tells the American worker frankly that the international revolution it proposes will put his life and limb at risk and diminish his standard of living, but that in the long run, if things go as hoped, there will be a world in which others will benefit vastly and in which he can take satisfaction provided his values and identity are radically transmogrified to those of a socialist ideal. I favor such a world, and am prepared for the sacrifices it entails, but most Americans, even working-class Americans, do not and are not. They want a bigger and fairer share of the American pie.
John D. Rockefeller, 3rd, in an effort to co-opt and channel any revolutionary impetus into a reformist path, captured this state of affairs, ". . . no revolution can succeed if it results in lowering the standard of living for most people." [1] I expect that you will dodge that issue with projected savings from the military budget and the elimination of profit, but the collective military budgets of a properly run global imperialism more than pay for themselves; and, most of the vast profits that currently stand as markers of relative wealth amongst the rulers could never be productively translated into real goods or services because they far exceed the current value of such — that's what finance capital is and does, my friend. [2]
Patrick, I have been rude and abusive to you in prior correspondence, but hopefully not undeservedly. My patience with WSWS on the issue of covert ops has worn thin over the years, but now I will once again try to take you gently by the hand without our having to meet and you will perhaps understand why. The 9/11 movement is sadly riven over what counts as evidence of a USG domestic covert operation and the mechanisms by which it occurred. I have from time to time attempted to direct you and WSWS collectively to the best evidence, but in vain, as your recent article on anthrax shows.
The fact is that the ruling class not only orchestrated 9/11, but as part of its showmanship, as part of its "shock and awe" declaration of power, blew up three buildings in the middle of downtown Manhattan and we the people have been relatively helpless to organize against this vast state crime. In fact, some of the very solid 9/11 researchers reject this possibility out-of-hand (e.g., Michael Ruppert, Mark Robinowitz, John Judge, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Paul Thompson). But if you look closely at the real 9/11 brainpower with scientific training and credentials, there is virtual unanimity about both conclusions and about what counts as good evidence for those conclusions. No opinions, no speculation, no nonsense. I did not expect you to put down your Trotsky in favor of becoming a "Truther," but I did hope that your modified understanding of how domestic covert operations are done in the U.S. might better inform your writings.
With that goal still in mind, I'm going to refer you at the very end of this letter to three on-line videos totaling less than 30 minutes that prove controlled demolition and do so not on our authority, but on the authority of NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), the scientific body finally assigned (after FEMA) to provide the official USG account of the collapse. David Chandler, a high-school physics teacher, attended a NIST public forum on their "DRAFT" report in which NIST officials explained that the collapse of WTC 7 was 40% slower than free-fall, as had to have been the case given the massive resistance from the underlying structure, i.e., free-fall would have violated the law of momentum because it requires that no resistance be present. Chandler stood up and advised that using the videos of the collapse from NIST and a free software program, it was possible to demonstrate that WTC 7 had undergone 2.25 seconds of free-fall. Chandler showed that NIST was able to offer its initial figure of 40% slower than free-fall only by arbitrarily deciding to start timing the "descent" considerably more than a second before the building began its collapse. Chandler's presentation forced NIST to revise its final report to admit the free-fall, but then according to NIST, mirabile dictu! free-fall no longer violated a law of nature.
Free-fall, just in case you don't get it, is possible only if there is no structural resistance. This can occur only if all the building support columns are simultaneously severed, something that requires controlled demolition. More formally, the potential energy of the building cannot be converted to kinetic energy at the rate of gravitational acceleration — free fall — unless there is zero structural resistance, which requires simultaneous severing of all support, i.e., controlled demolition. Chandler's three videos also show NIST officials palpably lying, engaging in conscious fraud, full stop. NIST did not show the good manners to serve Chandler, and others, the canapés to ease the contradictions. As I stated in "Pardon Our Dust, or, Why the World Trade Center Dust Matters",
I will be brief here from necessity. If the Towers and Building 7 were destroyed by controlled demolition, then these vastly complicated acts were coordinated through the security apparatus of the World Trade Center in conjunction with high-ranking members of the U.S. military, especially the Air Force, whose cooperation was required to assure that the commercial airplanes hit their targets, and with the media, whose job it was to disseminate the fiction of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda from the mouths of the intelligence agencies that coordinated this grand act of political theater. The cover-up was managed by control of the crime scene and subsequent "investigations", destruction of the evidence, and was anticipated through a variety of legislation and executive orders that are well known to 911 researchers. The USG, in cooperation with elements of private industry and finance capital, brought us 911. The 9-11 Commission, like the Warren Commission before it, remains a cruel hoax to euthanize critical public thinking. Not all of the actors who served the cover-up were aware of their roles, but they were ultimately set into motion by those who were.
Behind, and parallel to, the visible and overt political power structure lies the fundamental source of political power and action in the United States. It is known well only to those who participate regularly in it, and to a small number of persons, who for one reason or another have stumbled into it, have refused to look aside, and have pursued it to its bottom. I don't wish to dramatize the "invisible government" but these are the persons who control domestic covert action to effect profound changes in political power and political climate in extra-legal ways and who also own and control much of Congress. The motivation and sense of entitlement to do so is an old story, and keeping within the bounds of U.S. history there is John Jay, who would become the first Chief Justice of the United States, who said in arguing against popular suffrage, "The people who own the country ought to govern it." Covert action is one amongst many means that allow those who own this country to rule it without ostensibly violating the spirit of democracy.
These persons are united in keeping their deeds secret from the vast number of Americans even when they strongly disagree amongst themselves about the wisdom of a particular covert action like 911. Providing the details for this political perspective would take us too far afield, but it is this perspective that is entailed by the thermitic dust in the World Trade Center, one that would mobilize the American people could they only grasp it and come to terms with it. That is what people like Steven Jones, Niels Harrit, Jim Hoffman, Kevin Ryan, David Ray Griffin, Richard Gage & friends are trying to promulgate, and people like Dr. Moffett are trying to suppress.
I lifted the sardonic title of my 2006 essay, "Science, Handmaiden of Inspired Truth," Or Putting NIST in Perspective from a chapter of Robert A. Brady's 1938 classic "The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism." I had considered quoting the following passage, but decided against doing so from fear of being over-the-top. If anything, Chandler's videos, which have been available for nearly a year and half with limited effect, show that Brady was being modest. None of his examples is nearly so compelling as NIST being forced to admit free-fall for a 47-story building while denying controlled demolition.
The reader must clearly understand that there is no fundamental difference between the Nazi attitude toward the "natural" and the "social" sciences. Let him consider the solutions to the following propositions:
- I wish to travel to X, a distance of sixty miles, in half an hour.
- I wish to shoot John Doe.
- I wish to prove I did not shoot John Doe [having just shot him.]
- I wish to know that my maid is inferior to myself.
- I want to be told that there is no unemployment.
Let the reader then assemble the "expert counsel" required for supply of the answers which I wish given, let each expert be called a "scientist," and he has the full meaning of the Nazi position on both the physical and social sciences. The scientist, in short, is to proceed just exactly as does the conventional lawyer in the courtroom. He is to find out whatever the Nazis wish to know, and he is to prove whatever they wish to demonstrate. (p. 55)
The NIST reports are a continuation of just this sort of "science." The only thing missing from NIST's performance would be an argument as benediction to the Official Story that even if a law of nature had been violated, the crazy 9/11 Truthers had utterly failed to provide any direct evidence whatsoever that anyone in the USG, military, or ruling elite had been guilty of the violation. At this point the canapés would be served by the Queen of Hearts who answered Alice's protest that "one can't believe impossible things," with "I dare say you haven't had much practice! When I was your age I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Chandler's three videos are listed at architect Richard Gage's website, www.ae911truth.org, under "NIST admits freefall" in the left column. Chandler has recently added a simpler summary video that I recommend skipping: it's for people who have an intuitive grasp of the science itself. Chandler's videos are also at his own website, http://911speakout.org/, titled "WTC7: NIST Finally Admits Freefall." The other three carefully explain the high-school level science and display NIST officials' patent guilt and discomfiture at being pressured to lie apace to maintain the official story. The limited effect of his compelling videos is a sad commentary on how weak a force for most people, even very smart ones, is the effect of reason, logic, and science — not to mention morality, as the fundraiser illustrates, when it does not dovetail with self-interest — compared to the power of tribal authority where fundamental worldviews are at stake.
In his primer on the acquisition and maintenance of rational beliefs, Willard V. Quine, a major philosopher and logician of the past century, urged,
"Evidence for belief must be distinguished from causes of belief; for some causes of belief can be counted as evidence and some cannot. . . .The intensity of belief cannot be counted on to reflect its supporting evidence any more than its causes can. [3]. . . But at root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. [Thus] In the chapters ahead we will be interested in the ways of acquiring and sustaining right beliefs be they pleasant or painful." [4]
The beliefs of the science-based faction of the 9/11 Truth movement are repugnant even to them, and although supported by reason and science, reason and science provide no emotional appeal. They are opposed by the far stronger voice of tribal authority aided by the fact that these beliefs are painful, very painful indeed. Quine states an additional factor that explains why our task has been so difficult. As the title of his book suggests, our beliefs form a system in which consistency and coherence should be crucial factors, and which, like a web, must work as a coordinated whole. Furthermore, in assessing whether or not to accept a new belief, he recommends assessing its plausibility against the entire body of our beliefs, which are presumed to be largely correct. As Quine put it:
Often in assessing beliefs we do best to assess several in combination. A very accomplished mechanic might be able to tell something about an automobile's engine by examining its parts one by one, each in complete isolation from the others, but it would surely serve his purposes better to see the engine as a whole with all its parts functioning together. So with what we believe. It is in the light of the full body of our beliefs that candidates gain acceptance; any independent merits of a candidate tend to be less decisive. [5]
The worldview described above in "Pardon Our Dust" does profound violence to the "full body of our beliefs" in any conventional sense, and has been called "clinically insane," among other kind epithets. Admittedly, it has the unhappy burden of sounding crazy (to most people), but being true.
One ongoing debate amongst those who understand 9/11 as an "inside job" is whether the USG let it happen on purpose (LIHOP) or made it happen on purpose (MIHOP), but I suggest that this is not the best distinction to address, since, e.g., standing down Air Force defenses, or installing "US Visa Express" to facilitate entry of many of the alleged Saudi hijackers into the U.S. is both a "letting" and a "making" it happen. [6] The better distinction is whether or not the Official Story is "spooky" or contra-causal, i.e., whether or not it violates known laws of physics, engineering, or chemistry. As noted, it does, and the free-fall collapse is merely one of many. This wretched conclusion entails a more radical revision of our understanding of state power and organization than people like Ruppert, Ahmed, Judge or Thompson are willing to contemplate.
To put it more plainly, the ruling class blew up three goddamn skyscrapers in downtown Manhattan and nine years later the righteous hard-core left, and most of the public, hasn't a clue. How the hell did they get away with that? The unpleasant answer — and the sticking point that pushes back against admitting the contradictions between the Official Story and fundamental laws of nature, not to mention a vast body of ordinary inculpating evidence — is the existence of an apparatus of private-public state power that is vastly organized beyond most people's imagination yet wholly invisible to their sight, articulating the details of which lies beyond the scope of this essay. The unpleasant answer also underscores the difficulty in accepting it: unlike a scientific revolution that involves a radical but understandable "paradigm shift," the ugly facts of 9/11 force the destruction of much of our web of belief without telling us how to mend it, or with what to replace it. This is why understanding 9/11, and USG domestic covert operations generally, tends to repel the solid and sober-minded while also appealing deeply and darkly to those more loosely anchored to reality and opens the door to discredit those who expose them.
Among many measures taken to keep domestic covert actions from public consciousness, the perpetrators exploit the natural resistances described above. For all practical purposes, the mainstream media is the disinformation end of the intelligence community. As Quine notes: because most sciences are technical, hard to understand, and beyond the reach of most non-practitioners, they are readily impersonated by cults that gain popularity despite, or sometimes because of, the fact that they are incomprehensible.
So we find many of these [cult] theories borrowing liberally from genuine science, and many more using terms that sound, to the uninitiated, like the stuff of which true science is made. Now many of the bogus doctrines are actually unintelligible; their seeming content simply vanishes when closely scrutinized. But given the incomprehensibility of so much genuine science for so many of us, that very unintelligibility can be mistaken as a sign of authenticity. Alas it can even inspire reverence. [7]
Thus, to hide the contra-causal "facts" of the Official Story a smear program has been mounted against the 9/11 researchers with genuine scientific expertise who have proven that these "facts" violate fundamental laws of nature. Under the aegis of presenting a "united front," these scientists have been invited, and sometimes corralled, by the USG disinformation agents, often via the media, into the same tent with a group of crazies and/or USG agents pushing everything from mini-nukes to space-rays as an "explanation" for the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.
This tactic relies on the fact that most people correctly reject these "theories" as crazy and also instinctively harden against considering the seemingly crazy but true theories that threaten much of their entire worldview. And, less bizarrely, the science researchers have been lumped with varieties of "no-planers" who offer ill-supported or unsupported and often frankly false theories that no plane hit the Pentagon, or that plane switching occurred and that the hijacked commercial airliners did not hit the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. (I omit the crazies who claim that there were no hijacked airplanes, that the seeming airplanes were only holograms.) It is not from a wish to be divisive, but from a commitment to stick to evidence that is clear and compelling, rather than doubtful or dubious or worse, that the science end of the 9/11 movement has been conservative and declined such associations. Unlike politics, in 9/11 what matters the most is not the fact of shared conclusions, but the evidentiary path traveled to reach them.
Give my apologies to Joe Kishore for not contributing to the Socialist Equality Party fundraiser and instead asking him to attend a Richard Gage (AE911Truth founder) lecture in Los Angeles, and watch Gage's DVD, "9/11: Blueprint for Truth: The Architecture of Destruction," though our goals are similar. Chandler's example is one of many violations of laws of nature that the official story must embrace. Among my other favorites is watching the top 15-20 stories of the South Tower starting to topple over like an axed tree, and then disintegrating in mid-air while the undamaged bottom of the building explodes outward symmetrically top-to-bottom, supposedly crushed by the part that fell to the side. I wish that we were making this up. For rational evidence-driven folk like myself, the fact that basic laws of physics have been flagrantly defied by NIST and FEMA in the service of a cover-up without our being able to rouse the American people despite our best efforts, suggests the difficulty of the task before us. Basic Newtonian physics is uncontested, and is much easier to understand than Marxist economics. This flouting of physical science in the service of cover-up has been going on apace for nearly nine years now. Orwellian crimestop is in full bloom even amongst those who are otherwise capable of facing the evils of a capitalist system directly. I hope that you and your comrades at WSWS, who can see the first contradiction upon which the good Marcy stumbles but not the second, can clear your heads of it by coming to grips with what happened on 9/11.
Regards,
Michael Green
Michael B. Green, Ph.D. Clinical Psychologist Qualified Medical Examiner (1992-7/2006, retired) Former Assistant Professor of Philosophy University of Texas at Austin
References
- ^ "The Second American Revolution," 1973, Harper & Row, p.40.
- ^ I would love to be proven mistaken in the claim that we cannot all progress together materially, but it will take some hard economic figures and reasoning to do so rather than soapbox rhetoric.
- ^ "The Web of Belief," 2nd edition, with co-author J.S. Ullian, Random House, 1970, 1978, pp. 14-16.
- ^ Op. cit. pp.4-5.
- ^ Op. cit., p.16.
- ^ For the stand down, see, e.g., Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, "The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism" Olive Branch Press, 2005, pp. 288-291. See also, my essay, How They Get Away With It. For "US Visa Express," see Ahmed, p.220, and also, Powell Defends Visa Consul Nominee (Maura Harty,Visa Express) at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/781044/posts.
- ^ Quine, op. cit., p.6.
