A Tower Too Far?

By Michael Nagler

 

The other day I was chatting with a friendly checkout clerk at an upscale supermarket in Petaluma, CA.  The young woman behind me, far from getting impatient, cheerfully joined in.  This is California.  As the conversation was about little-known facts I took a chance and mentioned a little-known fact that has been much on my mind of late, the fact (yes, it is one) that on 9/11 three WTC towers were brought down by ‘controlled demolition.’ The clerk, a tall African fellow shook his head, “We don’t want to go there, when it comes to that one,” and the young woman’s good cheer froze. “I didn’t know that,” she stammered.

 

The facts made public by 1500 architects and engineers are no longer in doubt: that traces of nanothermite, the high-energy explosive used for such purposes, are evident in the dust of the site (even after much of the wreckage was hastily whisked away); the buildings fell into their own footprint in a way that would defy the laws of physics if they had fallen the way the official story has it; terrific explosions were heard and felt coming from beneath the buildings by numerous eye-witnesses (at least one of whom appears to have been murdered).  In short, the official story, that the buildings ‘pancaked’ to earth because key steel columns were softened by fire, is a lie.

 

“… by far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconception is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness to them” (William James) — i.e. by calling them “conspiracy theorists.”

 

Behavioral scientists, among them Lance deHaven-Smith from Florida State University, have given the rather bland name of SCADs, or State Crimes Against Democracy (most of these are cries against humanity) to acts that involve high-level government officials, often in combination with private interests, who engage in covert activities for political advantages and power. Proven SCADs since World War II include McCarthyism (fabrication of evidence of a communist infiltration), the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (President Johnson and Robert McNamara falsely claimed North Vietnam attacked a US ship), burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in effort to discredit Ellsberg, Iran-Contra, Florida’s 2000 Election and “fixed” intelligence on non-existent WMDs to justify the Iraq War.  What do many of these have in common with the battleship Maine, the Lusitania, Hitler’s staged Gleiwitz incident of August, 1939 and for that matter FDR’s pretending not to know the Japanese were about to attack Pearl Harbor two years later — and, as is now clear, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, which exhaustive studies by James Douglass show to have been orchestrated by elements in high circles of our government?  Like 9/11 itself, sometimes referred to as “the new Pearl Harbor,” they were cooked up to thwart peace initiatives or to plunge a country, notably our own, into war.

 

They have been much on my mind because of the alleged plot by “highest officials” in the Iranian government to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in New York City.  While it is remotely possible that what we are being told is true, this story is so unbelievable that doubts have been raised even in the mainstream media, where such doubts are usually rigorously smothered.  And this moves the issue into far more serious territory than that of academic acronyms (like SCADS) or a curious form of ‘emperor’s new clothes.’  For let’s face it: the people who assassinated President Kennedy – and his brother, and Martin Luther King, whoever they are, certainly have the power and the madness to drag us into a third, and far more devastating Middle Eastern war.

This makes it extremely urgent that we break through the psychological numbness that makes it possible for horrendous crimes to be “hidden in broad daylight” with nary a whistle of alarm.  The syndrome has to be stopped, and if those conspirators have their eyes on Iran it has to be stopped before they go any further.

 

One is tempted to cry out, Dan Ellsberg or Julian Assange, step forward and snatch the cover off these people!  But whoever they are they moved swiftly after Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to close the gap that got the camel’s nose under the tent of secrecy, to neutralize, as far as one can tell (e.g. from the electoral frauds of the 1990s) the one institution that protected us from this kind of plot, namely the courts.

 

The denial factor when it comes to monstrous crimes is very powerful, and the elements within and around our government who commit them have learned to count on it very successfully.  But as the old poem has it, “Truth crushed to earth will rise again;”  there is a resiliency in the human spirit that can surely be awakened so that a public now reeling from two disastrous military adventures that have brought us to the brink of financial and moral ruin already may show the plotters they have gone too far.  There is just a chance that we can use the latest ruse (as it appears to be) to not only stop the drive to wage war on Iran but break up the regime of lies and denial that is rendering our democracy powerless.  We will have to do two things:

 

•  Mount a “pledge of resistance” to offer serious civil disobedience in the event of any attempt to attack Iran militarily or provoke them into reckless action.  And more broadly,
• Bring about a regime of truth to replace the myth-driven fantasies that marked the country’s reaction to 9/11 (and concealed its origin).  This change has to reach deeper than the political: it has to include the existential lies of advertising — not just the lies about individual products (“scientific tests prove…”) but the implied lie that we need these products to be fulfilled — or need them at all, in most cases.  This is a kind of psychic background that renders us vulnerable to all manner of falsehood, including the “Star Wars” interpretation of terrorist attacks, and the belief that the only way to deal with them is war.

 

As Gandhi said, and demonstrated with his life, truth and nonviolence are opposite sides of the same coin.  Just as the practices of violence have lead us deeper and deeper into the regime of untruth, the practices of nonviolence can steadily liberate us from that deadly grip.