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-Caveat Lector-
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Media/Conover060402/conover060402.html
Has the Establishment Left become a handmaiden of the Republican
Right?
By Bev Conover
Online Journal Editor and Publisher
June 4, 2002�Gangway for the self-appointed gatekeepers of the left
who are on a crusade to spin, smear, attack, and label as loony
anyone who won't accept the official line that the events leading up
to and surrounding September 11 are nothing more than a series of
coincidences and intelligence failures.
This cabal of lily-livered leftists, ensconced in their ivory towers,
have decreed we are bad kiddies for even suggesting that the Bush
administration was complicit in or took advantage of the September 11
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the baddest
of all is Michael C. Ruppert, who publishes From the Wilderness.
Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive, in his May 29
article, Crude Politics of Scandal, wrote, "The claim that Bush knew
the U.S. would be attacked and intentionally let it happen for his
own nefarious purposes is well beyond my significant skeptical
powers. It assumes callousness at the loss of innocent American lives
that I wouldn't want to impute to any President. And it greatly
underestimates the likelihood of bureaucratic incompetence. (A hedge
fund against such incompetence would be a sure profit-maker.)"
Someone should clue Rothschild that his "significant skeptical
powers" have failed him, because we have a Supreme Court selectee in
the White House, not a president. So it is not a president we are
imputing such "callousness" or possible criminality to. Or has he
joined the "get over it" crowd?
Among the others lobbing missiles at us from the battlements are
Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public
Accuracy; David Corn, The Nation's Washington editor; Michael Albert,
co-founder of Z Magazine and system operator of the magazine's
Znet.org; Steve Rendall, FAIR's senior analyst; Chip Berlet, senior
research analyst for Political Research Associates; Larry Bensky of
Pacifica Radio's flagship station, KPFA; and Noam Chomsky, writer,
philosopher, and professor of linguistics at MIT.
Quite a lineup, eh? And there are others.
Ask yourselves why, if we are so loony�and Mike Ruppert is the
looniest of all�why these gentlemen are expending so much energy in
writing reams of copy denouncing us, with what has become the new
epithet, "conspiracy theorists?" Why not simply ignore us? Pretend we
don't exist?
What worse punishment can they mete out for our ignominious behavior
than ignoring us? Or is there more to their motives?
Might this be a tip-off that the Ivory Tower crowd prefers not to
soil its hands, but is using those of us in the trenches to do their
work? This could explain Rothschild calling for an independent
commission to get to the bottom of September 11, followed by, "But
what we don't need is crazy conspiracy theorists coming from the
left," then destroying his own argument with the following:
"Almost every time I've spoken in public since September 11, I've
heard variations of the following theme: Bush not only knew about the
attacks, but wanted the United States to be attacked so that he could
(and here you can take your pick):
"a) Increase his popularity by waging war
"b) Justify an increase in Pentagon spending
"c) Boost the profits of the Carlyle Group, a private military
investment group that includes Bush's father, among other
heavyweights."
So the "crazy conspiracy theorists" are confronting him wherever he
goes. That says something about people not buying in to the official
spin. And some would even say that they would answer "all the above"
to what George W. Bush & Co. knew or took advantage of.
Let us not forget the "dastardly" Rep. Cynthia McKinney, one of the
few Democrats in Congress with some spine, who had the gall to call
for an investigation into what warnings the Bush administration
received before the attacks. Rothschild included her among the "arch
conspiracists," leaving the others unnamed.
Corn, blowing a gasket for the second time over Ruppert's September
11 investigation�this time in a diatribe called The September 11 X-
Files�stooped to the old Soviet trick, since picked up by the right
wing, of questioning Ruppert's sanity.
The most malicious part of this smear is to stigmatize everyone who
seeks psychiatric treatment, as Ruppert did while he was on the Los
Angeles police force.
"Ruppert is not a reporter," Corn wrote, as if to imply journalism is
some sort of elite club and one must possess special credentials to
gain admittance. We don't license journalists in this country�yet. .
Furthermore, Corn is also dismissing the fact that Ruppert does have
credentials as an investigator. He was, after all, a cop.
He goes on, "He mostly assembles facts�or purported facts�from
various news sources and then makes connections. The proof is not in
any one piece�say, a White House memo detailing an arms-for-hostages
trade. The proof is in the line drawn between the dots. His
masterwork is a timeline of fifty-one events (at last count) that, he
believes, demonstrate that the CIA knew of the attacks in advance and
that the US government probably had a hand in them. Ruppert titled
his timeline "Oh Lucy!�You Gotta Lotta 'Splaining To Do."
While ripping Ruppert's timeline, contending he has no hard proof,
Corn, like the others, offers no hard proof that events surrounding
September 11 were merely a series of intelligence blunders and
coincidences with tragic results. He completely omits the fact that
Ruppert's timeline is but one small part of a nine-month long and
multi-faceted investigation, which includes pre- and post-September
11 geopolitics, and evidence of US government and corporate crime
that no one else has touched.
Not content with trashing Ruppert and also bashing on McKinney, Corn
dismisses Delmart "Mike" Vreeland, whom he calls Ruppert's "one truly
original find," as a con man with a long criminal history. With no
proof to counter Vreeland's claim of being a US Navy intelligence
officer, Corn dismisses the memo Vreeland said he wrote last August,
while being held in a Canadian jail on charges that were subsequently
dropped, and gave to his jailers for safekeeping. This is the memo in
which Vreeland claimed he had foreknowledge of the horror that was to
transpire in the US.
Michael Albert and Stephen R. Shalom ramble on for 18 pages in an
attempt to cast conspiracy theorists as nutcases, but "institutional
theorists" as good guys, all in another attempt to debunk the very
idea that there was anything conspiratorial in nature about September
11.
Norman Solomon, of all people, who for years has taken the corporate
media to task in his weekly column Media Beat, has been at the
forefront of the effort to discredit Ruppert, again without offering
any hard evidence that refutes what Ruppert has been writing.
In his April 25 column, Solomon wrote, "A former Los Angeles cop
named Michael Ruppert has been proclaiming that Vreeland 'was able to
write a detailed warning of the attacks before they occurred' on
Sept. 11. Ruppert has attracted a loyal following, but he's likely to
lose all but the most faithful adherents if they look at the
actual 'warning note' or find out a lot more about Vreeland's
background."
He accuses Ruppert of being an "expert at combining facts with
unreliable reports and wild leaps of illogic," when, like a good
prosecutor, all Ruppert has been doing is laying out bits and pieces
of information that seem to point to either the Bush administration's
foreknowledge of September 11 or its callously taking advantage of
the horror to strip the people of many of their constitutional rights
under the guise of "homeland security"�a term that should be sending
chills through every thinking person, not to mention an nonelected
occupant of the White House who has taken it upon himself to declare
war without end on some enemy defined only as "terrorists," when the
Constitution says only Congress can issue a declaration of war.
Where Solomon has erroneously called those who have been helping and
support Ruppert in his research "a loyal following," Steve Rendall
has ratcheted that up to "Ruppertites," implying that they are
nothing more than a bunch of mindless groupies. Shame!
Noam Chomsky, to some the father of the Establishment Left, who has
been persona non grata on corporate-controlled US airwaves recently
turned up on CNN with the "virtuous" Heritage Foundation fellow and
Washington retread William Bennett, who on a previous CNN appearance
with Paula Zahn dismissed Chomsky's bestseller "911" as appealing
to "the kooks in our midst." That insult apparently didn't bother
Chomsky one iota as he essentially agreed with Bennett that the
September 11 attacks were carried out by "terrorists" because "they
hate us."
Chip Berlet on Larry Bensky's Sunday Salon provided convoluted and
erroneous responses as to why military planes weren't scrambled the
moment it was known that a hijacking was in progress.
Said Berlet, "Why weren't there plans in place to scramble jets�why
wasn't there an assumption that hijackers would seize planes and fly
them into buildings?" And if you research every one of those
questions, what you find is information that goes back, 5, 6, 7, 8,
10 years about discussions about the cost effectiveness of changing
the way that hijackings are responded to. Remember that the air
traffic controllers were out of New Hampshire, and they were sitting
with a book in front of them, telling them what to do in what order,
okay? And if you look�and this is all stuff that you can find, not on
the web, but if you go to government repositories, you'll look at
documents, and they'll say things like, 'You don't scramble planes
until you've made contact with the hijackers.' Now why? Because the
assumption, which turns out to be false, is the hijackers are either
going to make a demand or want to land. And that if you hijack [sic]
planes before you're talking to them, they could freak out and shoot
the pilot. So you don't want planes flying next to hijacked airliners
until you're talking to the hijackers. Now is that a bad idea, in
retrospect? Sure it is, but it goes back 7 or 8 years."
Talk about pulling stuff from thin air. The FAA's and Joint Chiefs of
Staff's instructions pertaining to hijackings say nothing about
communicating with hijackers before taking action. To the contrary,
it is the absence of communication with a plane that makes the
situation an emergency. Has Berlet forgotten that in October 1999,
when a twin-engine Lear jet carrying golf champion Payne Stewart and
four others lost contact with ground controllers, shortly after
taking off from Orlando International Airport in Florida for what was
supposed to be a routine flight to Dallas, the FAA requested help
from the military? Two Air Force F-16s were dispatched and followed
the runaway plane as it raced across a half-dozen states, then ran
out of fuel and crashed in central South Dakota, killing all aboard.
It gets better: "'Why weren't the planes flown out of New Jersey
instead of the Cape?' Well, because the citizens of New Jersey who
live around the air force base, which is being dismantled little by
little, McGuire Air Force Base and several other air force bases
which have been being deconditioned and lowered in status for the
last 30 years because suburbs grew up around them, and they don't
want jet fighters scrambling from those bases all the time."
All the time? How many planes have been hijacked or lost contact with
ground controllers in the last 10 years? Is there something else we
don't know about? And a New Jersey community's sensitivity to noise
would hardly be a factor in such circumstances.
Yes, it is possible we could be wrong about the way the dots seem to
connect. But September 11 did not occur in a vacuum and more and more
keeps coming out each day. Moreover, the nonelected occupant of the
Oval Office and his cronies by manipulating energy costs�oil, gas,
electricity�started the economy on a downward spiral even before they
were handed the White House. Now we not only have an economy in
tatters, an empty treasury, the Social Security trust fund and the
federal workers' pension fund tapped out to hide the fact Washington
has defaulted on its loans, an illegal war that has been decreed to
go on into perpetuity, but an administration that in a little more
than 16 months has broken the record for scandals.
So how do we explain this behavior of the lily-livered left? If the
Ivory Tower gentlemen are leaving it to us in the trenches to get to
the truth, because they won't dirty their hands to help us collect
the bits and pieces to connect the dots, why then are they so
ferociously attacking our efforts? Are they currying favor with
someone? Is it time for us to start following the money?
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