EXCERPT from
"ALL FALL DOWN"
The Politics of Terror and Mass Destruction
By William Thomas
"Nothing would be what it is.Because
everything would be what it isn't. And
contrary-wise-what is, it wouldn't be.
And what it wouldn't be,it would. You see?'
~Alice in Wonderland~
WHAT NOW?
Rightly or wrongly,Alice had it right. Or,
as that great Yogi named Bera once said,
"When it comes to a fork in the road,take it."
Confuse people long enough(about 25 seconds
for the average T.V. viewer)-and they will click
channels,tune into less arduos distractions,
and reset their brains to "snooze" control.
It's a time-tested formula.Everyone who runs a
scam for personal,political,or financial gain
relies on their audiences's fractured attention to get
away with story lines that seem absolutely compelling
in the heat of some manufactured moment- but collapse
into complete nonsense if we run the tape back and view
it frame by frame.
Take the events Sept 11,2001.Absolutelyriveting video,
relentlessly repeated.
Authoritative news anchors looking dazed and grim,
throwing out official statements like lifelines to millions
of dazed and desperate viewers drowning in shock and
disorentation.
It couldn't be real, but it had to be true.
* * *
So we bought it. Or, most of it anyway. We didn't
ask why intelligence agencies who couldn't catch
a whiff of the most complex "hit" since the invasion of
Normandy knew the names of 19 cremated hijackers and their
renal-challenged ringleader within 48 hours of attacks that
killed 50,000, no 25,000, no 6000, no 2,500 people.
We didn't ask how frightened young men who couldn't
fly Cessnas could navigate and steer heavy jets into their
targets. Or why none of their names turned up on the
passenger lists of the four airplanes they were supposed
to have comandeered. (Total number of Middle Easterners
among the 257 passengers and crew: zero.)
We didn't ask what the United and American pilots
(three of them were military veterans) were doing while
men armed with quarter- inch knives demanded death to
fellow americans why their cockpit conversations were never released,
why eight indestructible "black boxes" holding the keys to so many
questions were rendered "inoperable" while hijackers '
paper passports escaped explosions and fire unscathed.
We didn't ask why a plane supposedly driven by its passengers
into two seperate crash sites in the Pennsylvania countryside came
apart in mid-air. Or why the president of the United States remained
more interested in the story of a pet goat than reports of airliners
crashing into Manhatten and the Pentagon.
We didn't ask why the CIA met with Osama bin Laden in an
American hospital as the biggest British battle fleet since the
Falklands sailed for waters off Afghanistan,why Washington gave the
Taliban $43million in May, or why the FBI and Attorney General of the
United States repeatedly ignored warnings and blocked investigations
into the impending attacks.
We didn't ask what the CIA was doing in the upper echelons of Big Banks
that profitted hugely from "short -selling" United and American stocks in
the final days before someone dialed 911.
We didn't ask why the head of the WTC arson investigation told reporters
there were "explosive devices" in the building, why so few survivors were
burned, or why New York firefighters were dragged away from Ground
Zero just when the Site was becoming safe and they were getting close
to the bottom of things.
* * *
We did not ask because we were not told what really happened.