Mother Jones: The Truth Is Out There
(Reposting from Mother Jones magazine, September/October 2008 issue, pp.95-97 for purposes of critique.)
The Truth Is Out There
In search of intelligent life in the world of 9/11 conspiracy theories
BY DAVE GILSON
FOR THE PAST FEW YEARS, I've received a steady, unsolicited stream of books and DVDs that purport to reveal What Really Happened on September 11. None of them have come close to convincing me that George W. Bush and his neocon cronies were either evil or, more important, smart enough to have orchestrated the terrorist attacks on the United States. Perhaps that's because I'm one of the media gatekeepers that the "9/11 truth movement" is fond of blaming for its lack of visibility and credibility. (According to Barrie Zwicker's Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-Up of 9/11, Mother Jones is part of the "phony 'left' media" co-opted by the "diaboligarchy.")
But I've held on to my growing library of 9/11 skepticism both as an artifact of an unpopular delusion and a guilty pleasure. In spite of my shadow-government puppet masters, I find the "Truthers'" mix of feverish delusions and all-American idealism oddly entertaining.
So when a couple of feature-length 9/11 conspiracy movies recently landed on my desk, I felt a twinge of anticipation. The Reflecting Pool and Able Danger are, as far as I can tell, the first thrillers inspired by Truther theories. Maybe, I thought, these films would have a dash of paranoid style. And just maybe they'd have what's missing in the online hall of mirrors that spawned the 9/11 truth movement--coherence.
These films are another sign of the endurance of the biggest conspiracy theory since--pick your favorite--the CIA/the Mafia/Castro killed JFK. September 11 truthiness will be one of the many bad hangovers of the Bush years. A 2006 Scripps Howard poll found that 36 percent of Americans think the government was somehow behind the attacks. Significant numbers also subscribe to the Truthers' various hypotheses for how it all went down: 16 percent said that the World Trade Center was actually destroyed by hidden bombs; 12 percent said the Pentagon was not hit by an airplane, but a missile. (The survey did not tally the popularity of other nuggets of Truther lore, such as the idea that 7 WTC was purposely demolished, that Flight 93 was shot down, that Mohammed Atta was a patsy, or that no planes hit the twin towers.) A handful of celebrities-Rosie O'Donnell, Charlie Sheen, Willie Nelson have recited parts of the Truther catechism. There is 9/11 conspiracy folk music (Jesse Goplen's "Controlled Demolition") and hiphop (Mos Def and Immortal Technique's "Bin Laden," which declares, "Bush knocked down the towers"). But the closest thing to a breakout work of pop culture is Steve Alten's The Shell Game, a Clancyesque thriller in which neocons try to best their 9/11 scheme by detonating a suitcase nuke in Los Angeles and pinning the blame on Iran.
What better way, then, to popularize an only-in-the-movies version of reality than with a movie? It's telling that the director of Loose Change, the best-known series, of 9/11 conspiracy documentaries thus far, originally planned to write a screenplay for a fictional thriller. The Reflecting Pool and Able Danger aspire to be conventional movies; they adhere to the formula for conspiracy thrillers, from The Parallax View to The Da Vinci Code. Both follow a protagonist whose discovery of the awful truth is confirmed by the mobilization of powerful forces intent on silencing him. Yet while most conspiracy Flicks rely on viewers to check their BS detectors at the door, the 9/11 movies don't want you to suspend your disbelief. Just the opposite: They want you to walk away a believer.
Fittingly, The Reflecting Pool begins with a journalist receiving a 9/11 conspiracy video. Lead character Alex Prokop, a reporter for a liberal California newsmagazine, is initially wary of questioning the official story. But in the first of many journalistic sins, he teams up with Paul Cooper, a 9/11 "researcher"--one of the exalted Googlemaniacs who form the truth movement's brain trust. Cooper's daughter died when Flight 11 supposedly hit the north tower, and he's pursuing a RICO suit against half the government. Aside from that, he's a totally reliable source.
Prokop and Cooper interview a parade of composite characters who rehash the conspiracy movement's greatest hits. Prokop doesn't Swallow every wacky hypothesis; he flips out after a Deep Throat-style meeting in a parking garage with a guy who rants about "holographic technology." Then he and Cooper go back to their hotel room and use wooden blocks and model airplanes to deduce that the Pentagon must have been hit by a missile.
While The Reflecting Pool is plodding and pedantic, Able Danger at least tries to make the preposterous fun. Shot in a neonoir style, its hero is Thomas Flynn, an affectless Brooklyn hipster who's written his own alternate history of 9/11. A mysterious Central European woman finds him, claiming to be in possession of a hard drive containing evidence of official foreknowledge of the 9/11 plot. After getting his hands on her MacGuffin, Flynn gets tangled in a web of deception and cartoonish characters, such as Luther, a cravat-wearing, Muhammad-praising baddie who sounds like a B-movie Nazi: "Vat shall ve talk about?"
Able Danger tips its tinfoil trucker’s cap to The Maltese Falcon, but its other inspiration appears to be Enemy of the State, the 1998 thriller in which Will Smith is stalked by an all-seeing National Security Agency. The high-tech surveillance team that's tracking Flynn identifies him as a "high-value target: anti-regime propagandist." When the men in black drag Flynn into an SUV, one reminds him, "Don't think because you operate in a little cafe in nowheresville Brooklyn that you're not being watched." Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean the government isn't reading your blog.
Needless to say, the Truthers have yet to find their Chris Carter or Oliver Stone. These movies repackage 9/11 skepticism in an accessible format, but they're practically inscrutable without descending further into the rabbit hole. Able Danger can only be understood by reading The Big Wedding by Sander Hicks, an indie journalist whose version of 9/11 involves an alliance of Islamists, neo-Nazis, technofascists, and a Republican "pedophilia cult." And God help you if you turn on the droning filmmakers' commentary on The Reflecting Pool DVD.
But the most annoying thing about the movies--and the Truthers--is that the actual truth, in all its awful complexity, isn't enough for them. No matter that 3,000 Americans died because of bungling and blowback, or that the Bush administration twisted their deaths into pretexts for unnecessary war and executive power run amok. The Truthers want more. They've missed the real lesson of the Bush administration, which is not that a secretive cabal runs the White House, but that its diabolic intent has been trumped by its staggering incompetence. Seven years on, the neocon notion that imperial power can reshape reality has been fully exposed as a fantasy. Yet the Truthers cling to the myth of official omnipotence, making them some of the last Americans who still believe that this administration could successfully pull off anything bigger than T-ball on the South Lawn.
To be sure, the Bush administration has made it all too easy to succumb to conspiratorial thinking. Due to official stalling and stonewalling, the full story of September 11 remains a work in progress. The 9/11 Commission's official account glossed over uncomfortable questions but read like a page-turner. Fittingly, a nation hungry for answers gobbled it up; nearly 9 million copies of the report were sold or downloaded, and it enjoyed a second life in comic-book form. The 9/11 skeptics have tapped into this desire for answers--a common Truther refrain is that they're "just asking questions." But that's like proponents of intelligent design saying they don't know how the universe was created. The Truthers aren't filling in the gaps in our reality; they're already living in an alternate one.
As Don DeLillo, no stranger to the power of conspiracy theories, observed shortly after 9/11, the terrorist attacks were a profound break in our narrative about how the world works and America's place in it. "The narrative ends in the rubble and it is left to us to create the counternarrative," he wrote in Harper's. That was before the Bush administration stepped in and wrote a counternarrative in which the United States was locked in an endless existential battle with a fathomlessly evil foe.
The dubiousness of that hastily improvised scenario is now apparent. Yet the 9/11 truth movement's narrative is just as maddeningly inadequate--and unimaginative--as the neocons'. A parallel universe inhabited only by patriots and pawns is an intriguing place to spend a couple of hours if you're watching 24 or a movie like Able Danger. But it's not the world we must face after the final credits roll.
Dave Gilson is a senior editor at Mother Jones.
Contact Mother Jones:
http://www.motherjones.com/about/admin/contact.html
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Note on text...
Betsy's son typed up a version for our use, but I was unable to use it due to a formatting problem. I copied the text above from the Uticans for 9/11 Truth blogspot;
http://uticansfor911truth.blogspot.com/2008/08/mary-harris-jones-turns-i...
The Uticans' version is annotated with comments from the blogger, at the source.
(Thanks for trying, Betsy! I'll try to figure out what the problem is.)
Thanks so much Rep for
Thanks so much Rep for reformatting and posting this! As you know, it was driving me crazy. I tried to post it 20+ times in different ways . . .
My son re-typed it in Microsoft Word (rather than directly to an email window) from the pdf file I had from a digital subscription to MoJo. It must have had something to do with that. Very frustrating.
Anyway, it's finally posted, and I REALLY hope that some people reading this will take the time to spread this article around to other 9/11 Truth sites and also write to Mother Jones magazine . . .
While I enjoy most of their articles, much like with Counterpunch & Consortium News, I do not like how they treat the 9/11 truth issue or its (our) activists.
Like Tucker Carlson or Bill O'Reilly they attack the messengers and not the facts.
Also, just for the record, earlier this summer I was running 9/11 Truth BlogAds on 21 different web sites, including 911 Blogger, OpEdNews and Raw Story. Mother Jones rejected my ad outright; Consortium News accepted it, but limited its appearance on its site when the ad was about the movie Press for Truth. When I renewed the ad with Consortium, they again accepted it (and the $400 monthly fee) but this time never ran it. This ad was the one that is currently running here on 911Blogger with Nathan Janes' 9/11 Truth dog. (I was able to get my $ back when no one - Nat Parry - responded or accepted responsibility for this to the support ppl at BlogAds.com . . . )
Satyagraha . . . Truth persistence . . . .
lol
"Yet the Truthers cling to the myth of official omnipotence, making them some of the last Americans who still believe that this administration could successfully pull off anything bigger than T-ball on the South Lawn."
Nah, we don't believe in the government's omnipotence, just the total cravenness and incompetence of mainstream media, including Mother Jones, in the areas of investigative journalism and basic inquiry.
We're already talking about all the evidence that points to 9/11 being something very different from what the official reports say. What is your excuse?
Stunningly Dismissive
...and potentially damaging, in light of the recent disinformation thread.
Particularly, comments like this:
"They've missed the real lesson of the Bush administration, which is not that a secretive cabal runs the White House, but that its diabolic intent has been trumped by its staggering incompetence. Seven years on, the neocon notion that imperial power can reshape reality has been fully exposed as a fantasy. Yet the Truthers cling to the myth of official omnipotence, making them some of the last Americans who still believe that this administration could successfully pull off anything bigger than T-ball on the South Lawn."
This sweeping statement presumes such full exposure, while most people won't even read the evidence or bother to listen to anything but the official story, much less accept it as "fantasy". Complacency is the enemy of Truth, and unfortunately, part of the American mindset.
"The Truthers aren't filling in the gaps in our reality; they're already living in an alternate one."
Again, there is a presumption of one reality, which for awakened Truthers, has become a painful and disturbing unreality. The dominant perceived reality paradigm is simply that - dominant. Perception is subjective. New facts and information must continually be assimilated into our understanding in order for us to transcend complacency and find the larger Truth that exists in a broader perception of "reality".
I do agree with this statement:
"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean the government isn't reading your blog."
Let's hope so. Read it and weep, you of the government who are supposed to represent We the People. Let's hope the handwriting is on the wall, but in the meantime, we must do as we are compelled, use our minds ~and our hearts~ to guide us towards inevitable revelations that will lead to a true revolution of consciousness. Only then will the Truth be set free at last.
I leave you with this image:
"Mother Jones", I imagine you represented here as a personification of the Statue of Liberty, blindfolded, surrounded by weeping masses who look to you for Truth and Justice, to no avail. Open your eyes!
Same old, same old
Gilson says,
They've missed the real lesson of the Bush administration, which is not that a secretive cabal runs the White House, but that its diabolic intent has been trumped by its staggering incompetence. Seven years on, the neocon notion that imperial power can reshape reality has been fully exposed as a fantasy. Yet the Truthers cling to the myth of official omnipotence, making them some of the last Americans who still believe that this administration could successfully pull off anything bigger than T-ball on the South Lawn.
Speaking for myself, Gilson is either dishonest or completely lacking in perspicacity. Some aspects of the Bush administrations' actions and inaction can indeed be ascribed to incompetence (e.g., not jumping on the lack of body armor problem for our troops in Iraq after it became widely known that they were inadequately equipped). But many if not most of it's most dramatic examples of SEEMING incompetence can be instead viewed as examples of a pre-meditated methodology, which can be fairly judged to be efficacious, to use disasters (both self-created, or 'inadvertently' created by 'incompetence') for crony capitalists to cash in.
Perhaps if Gilson read 'The Shock Doctrine' by Naomi Klein, and then interpreted 911 from a similar viewpoint, he would see how his claims of incompetence can be viewed as, ahem, unclever speculations. Furthermore, he could talk to 911 Truthers to discover how many of them view the Bush Administration as capable of "omnipotence", so as to gauge his own degree of self-delusion, not to mention naivete. Even if some 911 Truthers agreed with Gilson's accusation of belief in "omnipotence"t, how many more (such as myself) see no contradiction between assuming treason on the part of some powerful individuals within the government, but also a 'firewall' of unknown porosity between such a group and, say, the Bush Administration, taken as a whole?
But something tells me that Gilson will neither fairly critique US government actions in response to 911 from a Shock Doctrine perspective, nor will he bother to seriously study the 911 Truther community, to see if his generalizations are anything more than useful fictions, which make his essay sound plausible. Apologizing to the 911 Truth community might be a disagreeable event that Gilson could stomach, but seriously critique 911 from the perspective of a book that has doubtless been discussed in most of the Left media (of which Mother Jones is a member)? Are you serious? I'll wager 1 dollar that Gilson has already read The Shock Doctrine, but wager not even a penny that he would look at 911 through such a lens.
Doing so might raise all sorts of painful questions, not least of which is "Where the hell was the media, including the Left 'alternative' media, in exposing what a sham the government's 911 investigations amounted to?" If you allow that question, the very next question might be "What is the real nature of the media, and does it employ people who effectively collude in covering up mass murder?" And this question, of course, could be directed to Mr. Gilson, specifically.
Stupidity is forgivable, so is self-delusion. But conscious collusion is another matter.
As Mr. Gilson is a member of a profession which is supposed to get to the bottom of things, by doing real research, do tell us, won't you Mr. Gilson, what your track record is? We wouldn't want to think that you are a colluder, after all.
In particular, do tell us how much of an effort you and Mother Jones made to study the non-Middle Eastern associates of Mohammed Atta, both in the US and Germany. Are some of these associates international drug smugglers, or aren't they? Where does the drug smuggling money trail lead? And also, do tell us what effort you and Mother Jones made to track down who made money off of 911, via stock options. What was the results of your research into the $100,000 reported to have been wired to Mohammed Atta from Pakistani intelligence? True or false? A former boss of mine, a non-Muslim Pakistani, told me he doesn't believe it, since this was reported in an Indian newspaper, and Indian newspapers report defamatory, false articles about Pakistan often. But that's just one man's opinion. Did the fearless and tireless investigators of Mother Jones get to the bottom of this one, or not? Did they even TRY? Certainly, all journalists know that "follow the money" sometimes gets real results. Right? Finally, please tell us about the level of your investigation that interviewed people involved in defending air space in the NE US. A cousin's customer works at doing exactly that, and told him that there' no way that the 2nd WTC impact could not have been prevented. (And probably the first.)
I won't be holding my breath waiting for your answer. It's so much easier to write puff pieces....
http://www.pdamerica.org
http://www.change-congress.org
What he said.
Follow the money.
non-rebuttal
No exculpatory evidence of course, except the demonstrably ignorant opinion that BushCo is too stupid to do anything. This is the common "liberal" whitewash, championed by Bill Maher among others.
Too "incompetent" and stupid to steal the Presidency of the United States -- twice.
Too incompetent to launch illegal wars of aggression, with nonsense evidence manufactured on the fly, and yet get the opposition party leader to say: "Impeachment is off the table."
Stolen billions, or is it trillions?
Shredding the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations Charter, the US Constitution -- with impunity.
Deregulating everything, rolling back environmental protections to pre-Nixon days.
Yeah, what boobs.
They get everything they want, while idiots writing for Mother Jones can simply call them stupid. Talk about your reality deficit.
If you're going to talk about serious subjects, at least have the courtesy to inform your readers of relevant facts. "Able Danger", the movie can be playfully dissected. What about Able Danger the US government spy program that destroyed terabytes of intelligence data concerning "Al Qaeda", pre-9/11?
A little too messy for a fun and games movie review?
The guy's a propagandist, right out of the same mold we've seen for years. Douche bag.
70 Disturbing Facts About 9/11
John Doraemi publishes Crimes of the State Blog
http://crimesofthestate.blogspot.com/
johndoraemi --at-- yahoo.com.
You said it, JDR
This is a paint-by-numbers hit piece. This may be the first "second generation" hit piece, because it attacks fictionalizations of 9/11 Truth. Apparently, gatekeeper media needed a fresh angle on their own incompetence.
Even as a second generation hit piece, it fails. The title, for one, is such a hackneyed invocation of the X-Files it feels like something one would read in a high school newspaper about 8 years ago.
Cribbed from any of dozens other such hit pieces
'No matter that 3,000 Americans died because of bungling and blowback, or that the Bush administration twisted their deaths into pretexts for unnecessary war and executive power run amok. The Truthers want more. They've missed the real lesson of the Bush administration, which is not that a secretive cabal runs the White House, but that its diabolic intent has been trumped by its staggering incompetence.'
What's truly staggering is the gap between these gatekeeping 'alternative' journalists' conception of their own intelligence and their actual intelligence.
Still, I have to give some credit for concisely packing such a vast amount of gatekeeper idiocy into such a short passage. All the standard ingredients are there: 'bungling,' 'blowback,' 'incompetence.' Yo--don't you know Cockburn, Monbiot et al. have already written this same acticle, and that it hasn't slowed down the truth movement in the slightest?
As infuriating as I find such articles, I can always manage to find some optimism in this thought: They wouldn't bother lashing out at us like this if they didn't know full well that we're making inroads.
precisely
"They wouldn't bother lashing out at us like this if they didn't know full well that we're making inroads."
“On the altar of God, I swear eternal hostility against all forms of tyranny over the mind of man."--Thomas Jefferson
Mother Mockingbird
What strikes me most about this piece is that it never gets around to addressing the actual evidence of 9/11. His a priori counterargument to the 9/11 truth movement is that the Bush administration is too inept to have planned it. Indeed, too inept to "pull off anything bigger than T-ball on the South Lawn": Is that supposed to be fanciful wit, or are we to take it literally?
Silly me, it looks more as though this administration is inept like a fox. (Of course, Mother Mockingbird "Senior Editor" Gilson tries to buttress his argument with the straw man assertion that 9/11 truthers regard the administration as "omnipotent." But if it really was that, why would a 9/11 truth movement have developed in the first place?)
The U.S. (and a number of its bribed allies) have been occupying Iraq and Afghanistan for the better part of a decade now, with no plan for leaving on the horizon. (To the contrary, many permanent U.S. bases are being built there.) The Democratic presidential nominee to replace the termed-out Bush is backsliding on his earlier promises to get out of Iraq in 16 months of taking office (why so long? any reasonable person should wonder, even as 70 percent of voters want the U.S. out), yet is threatening to escalate our violent occupation of Afghanistan and "consider" invading Iran and Pakistan. Congress, in the hands of the party that's supposed to be opposed to Bush, keeps giving him all the military funding he requests plus billions extra, along with all the anti-Bill of Rights legislation Bush wants.
And Halliburton, of which Cheney was CEO before becoming Bush's VP nominee, has made hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars off all our "rebuilding" efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If that's incompetence, dear Lord, please give some of it to me that I may succeed half so well in my own endeavors.
Originally I was thinking of going over this Mother Mockingbird commentary, paragraph by paragraph. But there's so little polemical substance to it that I soon recognized it's be a boring exercise of shooting fish in a barrel -- or, more accurately, shooting into empty barrels.
I'll limit myself to addressing one self-flattering bit of "journalistic" snobbery:
"Fittingly, The Reflecting Pool begins with a journalist receiving a 9/11 conspiracy video. Lead character Alex Prokop, a reporter for a liberal California newsmagazine, is initially wary of questioning the official story. But in the first of many journalistic sins, he teams up with Paul Cooper, a 9/11 'researcher'--one of the exalted Googlemaniacs who form the truth movement's brain trust. Cooper's daughter died when Flight 11 supposedly hit the north tower, and he's pursuing a RICO suit against half the government. Aside from that, he's a totally reliable source."
Got that? This Paul Cooper can't be a real "researcher" -- because he's not a "journalist" working for a periodical. Unless you have those much-to-be-admired credentials (what credentials do journalists have, anyway, other than having secured a periodical to be published in?), you can't possibly have anything to offer. (Look at Daniel Ellsberg: What a presumptive upstart he was.) Worse yet, these pseudo-researchers Google a lot: No real "researcher" would dream of doing that. (Should we assume nobody at Mother Mockingbird Googles while researching for the magazine?)
As for following the money,
Was there truly a NESARA plan to go into effect at 9:00 a.m. on Sept. 11th, 2001?