By Matt Johnson
Time speeds up the older you get, possibly because each passing year becomes a smaller fraction of your age and also because, as life moves on, perception shifts accordingly. Although it has now been ten years since 9/11, it doesn’t seem so long ago that I was typing a small piece for this website in its immediate aftermath.
My family and I had plane tickets to return home to New York on 9/10 but, for various reasons, we’d stayed in Europe. If we had returned that day I’d probably have been wandering the streets besides the Twin Towers at the time of the attacks, as both my son’s school and my studio were just a couple of blocks from there, and whenever I returned from Europe, I was invariably awake early due to jet lag and usually walking around downtown. As it transpired, I watched events unfold from Sweden.
The attacks themselves were so shocking that, in the blazing intensity of that moment, it was possible to believe almost anything. Anti-Muslim hysteria was swiftly whipped-up into a frenzy as the culprits were quickly identified as Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. This, despite the previous error of instantly blaming Muslims following the Oklahoma City bombing, only to rapidly retract when it became clear the terrorists were, in fact, white, ex-military Americans.
Yet, as weeks and months of fevered speculation followed, the doubts began to nag. Two things specifically stuck in my mind like pebbles in a shoe. First, around a year before 9/11, I’d read some disturbing extracts from the document ‘Rebuilding America’s Defences’—a report by a Neo-Con think tank, a cabal of warmongers, named the Project For The New American Century (PNAC). It laid out their agenda in chilling detail. A sentence that especially jumped out is on page 51: ‘the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalysing event—like a new Pearl Harbour’. As the Neo-Cons had recently assumed control of the US government through the rigged election of George W. Bush, this seemed especially relevant.
The second pebble was a radio broadcast I’d heard in 1999 on local New York radio station WBAI. I can’t remember the name of the show or the name of its host, but he was an ex-military veteran of considerable experience, and I distinctly remember him warning, with some urgency, that malevolent forces had been infiltrating the upper echelons of the military/industrial/intelligence complex and, as a consequence, very dark clouds were now forming on the horizon of America. He warned listeners to be extremely vigilant. I got goose bumps whilst listening as he seemed so sincere and passionate.
And so now, ten years after, as we bear witness to yet another choreographed commemoration, another orgy of flag waving, is the general public any wiser as to who was really behind the defining event of our age? An event which not only caused the loss of thousands of innocent American lives but which has subsequently destroyed millions of innocent Muslims’ lives and led to a state of permanent war abroad and a virtual police state in America.
Watching and reading mainstream media, you wouldn’t think there were any doubts at all. In actual fact the majority of them are now so tightly aligned with the foreign policy aims of Western governments that much of their output amounts to little more than state stenography. A more accurate description of this monolithic corporate media would be Ministry of Propaganda, and a more accurate description of many of its journalists would be, to quote Gerald Celente, ‘presstitutes’.
Lately, this output has become an Orwellian parody as illegal invasions and seizures of the resources of sovereign nations by the West are passed off, with a perfectly straight face, as spreading our cherished values of freedom, democracy and human rights. Citizens of these nations are to be bombed by NATO for their own protection, of course.
Such malignant schemes, delivering ‘democracy’ to a country at gunpoint whilst thieving its resources, are obviously long in the plotting, and a complicit media is therefore essential to keep the wool pulled firmly over the eyes of the population of the aggressor nation. As unrest is fomented on the ground of the target country; on cue, the Western media begin beating the drums for war in the guise of humanitarian intervention, and public opinion is consequently dragged into line like a dog on a leash.
In Britain, the BBC—despite a previous worthy attempt to take the Blair government to task over the dodgy dossier affair that helped launch the illegal invasion of Iraq—has since been castrated. Their coverage of the recent attack upon Libya and the true motives behind it was worse than useless, and misled the British public throughout.
It is now left to independent journalists and other outsiders, speaking through the growing alternative media and the Internet, to alert and inform the general public. But how long until the Internet itself is under assault? What will be the excuse to control it, I wonder? Terrorism? Fraud? Pornography? National Security?
So, will we ever discover who was really behind 9/11? My own feeling is that we know a seed by its fruit and it’s now clear, for all to see, the grotesque varieties dangling from the vast tree of death that has emerged from the footprints of the Twin Towers. To know who planted the seed we must simply ask ourselves whose interests have been best served in the decade since 9/11? A decade of near psychopathic aggression and imperial adventure by America, aided by Britain and Israel, which has borne Guantanamo Bay, Abu Gharib, illegal US/NATO invasions of sovereign nations, routine violations of the Geneva Convention, extraordinary renditions, torture, secret CIA prisons, water-boarding, totalitarian police state measures, the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the Bill of Rights shredded, the loss of habeas corpus, NSA wiretaps, TSA groping, innocent citizens regularly labelled potential terrorists, a population kept in a state of frenzied fear and herded like sheep. The list is virtually endless and the America many of us once loved is now descending, at an increasing pace, into a corporate fascist state.
Who can doubt that the entire post-9/11 agenda has not fully served the nefarious Neo-Cons/Neo-Fascists? Although it is worth bearing in mind, of course, that since WW2, the USA has bombed 30 countries, attempted to assassinate over 50 foreign leaders, attempted to overthrow over 50 governments (many democratically elected), and crushed or subverted liberation movements in 20 countries. But these policies have now been placed on steroids by the Neo-Cons.
As an informed citizen, it’s always useful to continually remind yourself that your government lies to you—most of the time. Yet it’s also important to remind yourself that anyone who dares question these official lies, such as the fairy tale of 9/11, as laid out in the Kean-Hamilton Commission Report, will be routinely ridiculed or marginalized as a crank, paranoiac, commie, freak, anti-American—or, of course, a conspiracy theorist.
Yet when is a conspiracy theory not a conspiracy theory? Just in my lifetime, conspiracy theories which turned out to be conspiracy facts include Operation Northwoods, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, USS Liberty incident, MK Ultra, Watergate, COINTELPRO, Iran-Contra, Iraq-WMD, amongst countless others. It always amazes me that so many otherwise intelligent people still doubt that Western governments can so casually lie, spy, and conspire against their own populations.
In Britain recently, the scales must surely have fallen from the eyes of even the most brainwashed and patriotic individual as the lid was briefly lifted on the seething, festering nest of corruption known as the phone-hacking scandal. The fact that so many of Britain’s ruling elite were coated in the slime of this corruption, from top policemen and politicians to media barons and members of the judiciary—and we’ve not even mentioned the banksters—surely didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone with a scintilla of intuition? Forget the feral underclass of the recent UK riots; here are the real looters of Britain—the venal overclass.
Truth, like life itself, yearns to see the light and, as more and more compelling evidence emerged in the last decade, it became increasingly clear—to anyone with an open mind, that is—that the biggest conspiracy theory of our age is the official version of 9/11. There were just too many bizarre coincidences, too many unexplained events, too much suspicious behaviour that has gone unexplained. It was just not possible to take it seriously. It was a cover up. A whitewash.
It would be naive in the extreme to assume that classic terror tactics, such as false flag operations, agent provocateurs and other black ops, have not evolved in sophistication to match the breath-taking technology of the latest military hardware. Al Qaeda, assuming it exists, is likely to be an asset trained and controlled by the CIA and operated like a marionette. Because, without such an ‘outside’ threat, there could be no justification for the never-ending ‘War on Terror’ or, pertinently, it’s never-ending budget. It is a war against an enemy that is both everywhere and nowhere. It is un-winnable—which is exactly its purpose.
But the biggest question underlying all of the above is: who are the real puppet masters? Who funds these extremist think tanks? Who pre-selects the candidates for government? Who pulls the strings of our representatives once they are ‘elected’? Who secretly directs the intelligence services? Governments come and governments go, but the real power behind the throne is continuous, and asserts its baleful influence upon an unwitting population from the shadows, all the while plotting global hegemony. It is into those shadows, into that darkness, that we must collectively shine our lights.