PBS Makes Doubting 9/11 Story Respectable
I don’t pretend to know why our propagandists in the mainstream news business publish everything that they do. But as of April of 2007 it was evident to me that The Washington Post and The New York Times were doing their level best to keep doubts about the official version of what happened on September 11, 2001, away from their generally mainstream liberal readership. We can see that in their coverage of Rosie O’Donnell’s departure from a major network daytime talk show, as evidenced by my article below.
Now our Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has broken through the 9/11 truth blackout to precisely that same audience by its airing of the powerful documentary on the subject by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. So popular has it been that Colorado Public Television has used it for their fund-raising program and it was the “most shared” video that PBS produced in the first full week of September.
After their more than decade long silence about the numerous impossibilities in the official 9/11 story, it’s easy to suspect that what PBS is doing now is employing #9 in the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression and “coming half clean.” After all, much of the thinking public has by this time progressed well past accepting the idea that three steel reinforced buildings could have collapsed because of some limited fires in them to examining evidence as to who really was behind the attacks. Consider, for instance, the recent article in Veterans Today, “9/11 and Zion: What Was Israel’s Role?”
But by its complete destruction of the official story on 9/11, which plants the entire blame for what happened that day on 19 young Arabs wielding box cutters who were working for a shadowy organization known as Al Qaeda, the PBS opens the door wide for just the sort of analysis as the Veterans Today story presents. Furthermore, it has been quite a long time since the mainstream press, including PBS, has paid much attention to anything that could even be loosely defined as the “thinking public.” Rather, it is the same regular audience of mainstream liberals that is watching this critical 9/11 video, and it is apparently making an impression on them.
So rather than wondering endlessly as to what PBS could possibly be up to by airing this extraordinarily educational video, maybe we should just embrace what they have done and send it to everyone we can think of who still needs that sort of education. Many of these people might have short attention spans, so one might begin with a shortened, 15-minute version of the video, including an introduction by actor Ed Asner.
It’s certainly too early to celebrate when virtually our entire foreign policy continues to be based upon the assumption that Muslims were behind 9/11 and we continue to be exposed to such appalling displays as Scott Pelley’s worshipful interview on 60 Minutes of one of the supposed killers of the supposed orchestrator of the 9/11 outrage. Even for PBS, this airing of the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth video may not be so much a #9 of the Seventeen Techniques, but a #14, “bump and run.” At least for the near future one may expect all the rest of its programming and its news reporting to be predicated upon the exact opposite of what one can conclude from the video. And such major opinion molders as The Washington Post and The New York Times will continue simply to run from the subject of 9/11 doubt, as they did in their coverage of Rosie O’Donnell’s departure from “The View”:
Post Suppresses News on Rosie’s 9/11 Doubts
I posted the following poem on my web site on July 9, 1998:
Born
to Blush Unseen
When the best thing you read in The Washington Post
Is the occasional scolding letter,
Just think of the ones they refuse to print,
Don't you know they're a good deal better?
The letters to which I refer usually appear in the "Free for All" section of Saturday's newspaper, the page just before the regular editorial page. The practice has continued unabated, although since Tom Toles replaced the deceased Herb Block as the regular editorial cartoonist, it has become a close call as to which deserves the superlative label. With his recent cartoon showing two newspaper readers, one reading a headline saying that the American people wanted us out of Iraq and the other reading a headline saying the Iraqi people wanted us out of Iraq, but President Bush saying that he had worked out a compromise that we stay (for the sake of democracy), Toles had forged slightly ahead. But then on April 28 came one of the best, most perceptive scolding letters ever, by Bob Petrusak of Fairfax. Here it is:
McCain's Iran Gaffe
It is appalling that the April 25 and 26 front-page articles about Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign ignored his recent parody of a Beach Boys tune, which suggested that the United States "bomb Iran."
Critics of the parody have been told to "lighten up" and allow the Arizona Republican some opportunity for levity. However, McCain was responding to a very serious question.
Is it asking too much of a man who aspires to the presidency to respond seriously to serious questions on war and peace? Is it asking too much of The Post to report facts fully regarding a presidential candidate?
Actually, The Post has come up with a tricky new method for deceiving the public about its news suppression tactics. Someone who already knew about McCain's extraordinarily callous joke about spreading death and destruction from the air in Iran might search out, say "McCain" and "Barbara Ann" on the Net and find this Post article right away. It puts a pro-McCain spin on the story, but at least it doesn't suppress the news of McCain's bloody-minded jest entirely. But look carefully. There's no page number on the story. What that means is that the article never appeared in The Post's print edition at all, and more than likely it was never displayed in any layout of articles on The Post's web site. The reader had to know about the story in advance before he could ever find it on The Post's web site. The Post does this sort of thing a lot these days.
But it gets worse, much worse. In a long article on the front page of the Style section of April 26, 2007, they tell us that Rosie O'Donnell is leaving the daytime program "The View" in spite of a rather spectacular increase in ratings in the short time she has been on the program. They also tell us that she has been a participant in some controversies. However, if one does a Google search for "Rosie O'Donnell," the fifth item that comes up is this March 17 piece entitled, "Rosie O'Donnell Goes Public on 9/11." It is well known to anyone who cares about such things that she has done more than just a one-time bump and run on the subject on her program. If you Google "Rosie O'Donnell 9/11" the hits run on for pages. Somehow, The Post found this subject unworthy of mention in its article. Furthermore, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly on Fox and Joe Scarborough on MSNBC have been screaming for Rosie's head for weeks on account of her 9/11 remarks, so one can't say that it's just Internet news.* Nevertheless, The Post saw this little dust-up as unfit to mention in its story about O'Donnell's leaving "The View." (So did The New York Times, for that matter.)
Now here comes the last part of the poem. To my mind the termination ("voluntary" or otherwise) of the only figure with a regular national audience who has raised serious doubts about the ludicrous official 9/11 story, when government shills on TV have been braying for her scalp, is really big news, and The Post never deserved scolding by its readers more for this shameless bit of news suppression. You can bet the house, though, that you will never, ever see any letter in The Washington Post that gets within a mile of this topic.
So, at this point, I think that it's time to disinter a poem that I wrote back in January of 1999:
Here's to the letters
editor,
The person who rations the word.
His job is to see that vox populi
Will never, ever be heard.
*It is safe for right-wing propagandists catering to the most simple-minded of the conservative set to tell us about Rosie’s 9/11 doubts because she epitomizes the sort of person that they despise, and a simple “How dare you?” from them is all that is deemed necessary to dismiss her argument, no matter how cogent it might be.
David Martin
April 29, 2007
The Post’s studied avoidance of any mention of doubts about the official 9/11 fable continued right through the middle of 2010, and it encompassed more than doubts by an American celebrity. This time it was applied to the views of the former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), Hamid Gul. See “Post Silent on Gul’s 9/11 Views.”
Now, as we arrive at the eleventh anniversary of the outrage, PBS has positioned itself somewhat more “truthward,” shall we say, than the likes of The Washington Post and CBS. But it still has a long way to go to come close to the best that can be found on the Internet, as exemplified by “911: Who, What, Why, and How????
September 11, 2012
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