Skirmishes on the Fringe,
by John Kaminski
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In recent days and weeks, I have had the unpleasant experience of
being privy to arguments I'd just as soon not have heard, involving
people who all firmly believe that the 9/11 stories we have heard from
the government are clearly false, but who differ on what the particulars
of these matters actually are.
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Because I share the confidence of (some of) these people, I may not
name them outright (though many of you will be able to guess who they
are) because I want to keep hearing from them and processing their
information in my increasingly congested and befuddled mind. I know this
makes me sound like just another government functionary obscuring
reality with finely tuned propaganda, but let me stress at the outset
that I believe mainstream media are hopelessly poisoned by financial
deception and political manipulation, and anyway, I get my information
from the fringes. I think you can trust the fringe more than you can the
mainstream. But now some of the fringes are radically diverging in their
perceptions of what is actually going on.
The most recent distortion involves the Pentagon debate: did a
jetliner really crash into the Pentagon, or was it some other craft,
device or process that caused that catastrophe? A large segment of
conspiracy researchers believes Flight 77 was not the cause of the
Pentagon disaster. The most popular theories, as I have read them on the
Internet, suggest either a cruise missile or a smaller jet.
A few months back, there was a riotous e-mail circulating titled
"Where's the Boeing?" It contained many photographs of the relatively
small hole in the Pentagon wall and the sparse amount of wreckage
nearby. Superimposed on the photos, supposedly, was a silhouette of the
jetliner. The silhouette was, of course, much larger than the hole in
the building.
Also floating around of late was another hilarious e-mail, and
advertisement for a mythical product called "super lawn," or some such
name, featuring pictures of the pristine Pentagon lawn and the hole in
the building, pitching, as a joke, that this lawn could survive a plane
crash and not even look mussed. It was a compelling argument.
Let me just say out loud that I think the hole in the Pentagon was
not made by a giant passenger airliner. It's not big enough. But I'm
only making my judgment on the basis of photographs. I wasn't there. And
I would not insist that I could not be proven wrong, although I have yet
to be, to my knowledge.
Anyway, this latest flap between the two well-known conspiracy
researchers illustrates the two sides of this question. Both take their
positions with utmost sincerity and seriousness. Both have reputations
of seeing behind official lies and positing credible alternative
scenarios. Both are condescending and rude to each other, even though
both have spent the better part of their lives trying to expose the
myths that handicap the average citizen as the government and its
favorite sons make off with large quantities of our hard-earned tax
money.
So one side of the argument says no one saw the plane hit the
Pentagon, the other side says there were plenty of witnesses. The
argument careens among flight trajectories, lamp poles knocked down and
security camera tapes confiscated. One side says no relevant body parts
were found; the other insists a severed arm still wore a bracelet that
was identified by a friend who gave it to the victim as a present.
And on it goes. The flak machine in charge of covering up the
genuine story of what really happened on Sept. 11, 2001 could not have
invented a better ruse at distracting people from what the real question
about 9/11 should be: who did it? And though both sides of this argument
profess that their objectives are to get at the real question of who did
it, both are caught up in this diversionary deception of what kind of
object really hit the Pentagon, which distracts everyone from the real
question, the important question.
I don't know exactly what happened at the Pentagon, but I do know it
is a secondary question. It's not the real question. In the words of
Mike Ruppert (not one of those involved in this particular flap), which
he uttered sometime last summer, we all need to refrain from making
wild, unprovable assertions, and focus on what evidence is available to
make our case.
And having said that, let me just say that I believe nothing that
has happened or has been written in the past 15 months has come close to
making me believe that President Bush was not involved in the planning,
execution and cover-up of the 9/11 massacre. I feel I have enough
circumstantial evidence for an indictment, but I am not certain I have
enough evidence to convict. And I'll be the first to admit that I have
not always followed Ruppert's advice.
Another skirmish on the fringe happened to me personally, just the
other day, when I received an e-mail from one "Jack Riddler" listing a
number of websites that he insisted were essential reading to probing
the 9/11 mystery. Of course I am immediately suspicious when someone
uses a pen name, but I tried to keep an open mind and looked at his
list. It was a great list: From the Wilderness, Emperors Clothes,
Unanswered Questions and about 20 others. Almost all of them were known
to me personally as sites that raised penetrating and legitimate
questions about the actions of the government. So I put my computer into
"forward" mode, and shipped the list to all my e-mail friends, which
contains mostly average folks with questions but also includes some very
formidable writers.
One of these formidable writers - maybe the very best one on my list
- wrote me back and demanded to know how could I send out such a
spurious list, especially one from a "latecomer" who was not around in
the trenches shortly after 9/11 happened, when it was downright
dangerous to be questioning the government's official line on the
disasters. I wrote her back and said names and times of arrival in the
debate weren't as important as publicizing these sites to the max,
because the important thing was to get more people to keep asking
questions. Well, she wrote me back and said she was blocking me from her
e-mail list because she didn't care to be arguing the point with "other
writers."
There I was, busted again for trying to do the right thing.
So as we see by now, the opposition to the official cover-up of 9/11
has fragmented into peripheral, factional arguments that in fact serve
the purposes of the power elite, without them having to lift a finger to
create the distracting diversions. God knows they've created enough
already. Maybe it's just the human condition that creates these rifts,
but I'm left standing alone, trying to make the point that there's
enough disinformation being strewn in our paths without creating more on
our own.
The sad fact is we are confronted by a media monopoly that has no
intention of ever printing the real, true stories about what happened on
9/11, or in the 2000 election, or about the poisons in vaccines, or any
of the other issues that are so important to us all. What is important
to us is simply not important to them. They're out to make money; we're
out to live better lives. The objectives, by and large, are mutually
exclusive.
Yet, if we are reach a critical majority that espouses human
compassion rather than let ourselves be enslaved by slick, superficial
slogans like "unending growth" and "war on terror," we're going to have
stick together. We're going to have to find ways to postpone debate on
Pentagon peculiarities and who has the right to say what, and find ways
to appreciate and consolidate each other's arguments, all for the
greater good of throwing off this glittering electronic yoke of tyranny
that jeopardizes our future existence. And that means trying to
understand what people who don't agree with us are saying, because we're
all trying to reach the same goal, which is freedom from the greedy
bastards who are manipulating us all into oblivion.
Having said that, we need to talk about the Right and the Left and
religious discrimination. Most of the people on the left who participate
in peace demonstrations take a dim view of the Patriots who so jealously
guard their right to personal freedom, without realizing that it is
contributions from the right that have created the kind of freedom that
permits people on the left to advocate their noble causes. But the right
has the same kind of blindness, labeling people on the left communists
or delusionals for seeking for freedom for others to the same degree
that we would claim it for ourselves.
Much of this exclusionary discrimination is religious. Jews, reeling
from centuries of Christian persecution, insist Muslims are trying to
take over the world. Most Jews are unable to conceive of the idea that
Muslims are merely trying to fight off another unjust invasion from the
West. Christians, smugly asserting their superiority over everyone, look
down their noses at all other religions. And Muslims, victims of truly
arcane religious practices of their own device, are hammered from all
sides by hypocrites who consider them primitive. Yet at the bottom of
all the religions are the preaching's of peace, which are conveniently
ignored by those who try to increase their own power through the use of
religious fascism.
I speak to people with all kinds of political perspectives on a
daily basis, guys holed up in the country who are ready to whip out
their pistols at a moment's notice to women who are ready to stand in
front of tanks and wave flowers to try to stop them. One of the latter
group said to me the other day: "Why can't we just all admit it. BUSH
DID IT. It's so clear."
Since she was echoing my inmost thoughts, it was difficult for me to
say, "I wish we could. But we have to prove it to people who don't want
to believe it. I won't do any good to say it if we can't prove it."
She replied, "But we can prove it. It's so obvious."
But she was wrong, even as much as I believed what she said. And
even if we can prove it - which we may never successfully be able to do
- that will be only half the battle. The other half will be getting the
mass media to print it, so the rest of the world may know what we
already believe in our hearts. And the mass media will never do that,
because that it not their purpose, much as we would wish it to be. Just
like it is for laws, the true purpose of the mass media is to spin a
series of convincing lies so that we won't rise up and attack our
masters.
The only thing I know to do is to try to capture one mind at a time
with irrefutable evidence, even though most of the evidence is not
irrefutable, and even though mass media captures their impressionable
minds a million at a time.
We can't know for sure that Bush killed Paul Wellstone, even though
it seems highly likely.
Many of us can see that stalling the 9/11 investigation as Bush has
is almost a sure sign of guilt, but that is still highly circumstantial.
The appointment of Kissinger only increases the suspicion.
A lot of us know that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida received much of
their early funding from the United States government, as did Saddam
Hussein, and that Bush's early success in business happened with funding
linked to the bin Laden family.
More of us still know that the 2002 election was a sham because of
computer manipulation of the voting machines, that government-mandated
vaccines are dangerous because they won't tell us about all the
ingredients that are in them.
But until we can prove it, and then get the mass media to print it,
it won't mean anything.
Perhaps - just perhaps - many of us have been striving toward the
wrong objective, that being an all-out assault on the obvious lies
mouthed by the maladministration of George W. Bush. This line of thought
takes me back to the last presidential debate, Bush vs. Gore, which Gore
seemed to have won until Kokie Roberts and her media companions
delivered the post-debate analysis and to a person inveighed that Bush
had really won. That was a foretaste of the actual election. Kinda like
the line "war is peace."
Maybe the real focus of our wrath - and target of our search for the
truth - should be Big Media, without which Bush could not get away with
what he's doing. Bush has never told us the truth, and Big Media (not to
mention the Democratic Party, which is in on the Big Lie) has never
called him on it. It is the media, far more than Bush himself, which
shapes our skewed view of things. But like the courts and like the
Congress, Big Media is oblivious to the truth, and aligns itself to the
powers that provide it with the most money.
So it has to be one person at a time. There is no way possible for
this to work. But there is no other alternative, and all our lives
depend on us making it work. Otherwise, as is the case with the U.S.
Constitution, everything we have worked for is lost.
- John Kaminski
John Kaminski is a writer living on the coast of Florida who doesn't
really know what to do to stop the corporate enslavement of virtually
every person on Earth.
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