link:  http://mwcnews.net/focus/politics/6160-the-coming-of-the-flood.html

For those who usually give no attention to the list of US client states that rubber-stamp the UN votes of the US and Israel and contribute to the thin veneer of moral legitimacy of its obviously illegal wars for oil and empire, Australia is that large Southern Hemisphere continent between Indonesia and Antarctica. Aside from assisting the CIA in minor ways in its intrigues against the Chilean, left-wing government of Salvador Allende in 1973 the Australian secret services were doing their treasonous part at home by contributing to similar intrigues against the Australian, left-wing government of Gough Whitlam. Many Australians today understand that both of the major parties dominant in Australian politics (just as in the US and Britain) are, in the words of George Galloway “two cheeks of the same backside” and that whichever is in office, which always depends on the consent of the US ambassador and the foreign owned corporate media, the government is a US-compliant puppet no different to those of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Kevin Bracken appears to be one Australian who understands the situation and gave some indication of it in his attack on a radio talk-show host with the comment that “Unfortunately cowards like yourself have set the political agenda in this country for too long”. In his position, as Victorian Trades Hall president, he probably knows better than most how Australia’s situation came to be. But Bracken has opened another great crack in the dam wall for 9-11 Truth with his public comments that the attacks of 9-11 were not the result of terrorist activity and that the official story was itself a conspiracy theory that "didn't stand up" to scientific scrutiny.

Stamping on the Ants’ Nest

Predictably, Bracken’s comments brought out the swarms of angry demands for silence. The talk show host instantly drew the “nutter theory” card and dismissed any suggestion of debate, the political “opposition” demanded that the government take action against Bracken “to send a message that such remarks are unacceptable” and the Prime Minister dismissed the comments as “stupid and wrong”. This pattern of certain opinions being “unacceptable” or offensive is so long established in Australia that it has become part of the “culture”. One is often told, in the manner of a gentle warning, that “you’re entitled to your opinion” but the expression of opinion, particularly if at variance with the accepted wisdom, is generally regarded as anti-social behaviour. Having the audacity to ardently defend an opinion is a social outrage that will attract a reputation for intellectual arrogance or, in the Australian idiom, being “up yourself”. Corporate power has assumed the de facto role of censor and enforcer having not only the capacity to deny livelihood or career advancement but also to deny service when “unacceptable” opinions are expressed (For example).

Opinion flows from the top as a lava of unfounded assertions such as “It was a terrorist attack, and we condemn it” from zealous lackeys to power like Trades Hall secretary Brian Boyd while contrary opinions may be dismissed out of hand as “stupid and wrong”, also without any need for rational substantiation.

However, none of these defenders of the nest, it seems, has realised that their exertions only emphasize that if these views were so “stupid and wrong” they would be no threat to the establishment view, and probably would not be shared by more than 50% of the Australian public. Still more, none of these instruments of managed public opinion has the wit to understand that once the accepted wisdom is seen as obviously flawed, the tactic of silencing all debate on the subject only further entrenches the widespread view that there are matters in need of debate and that resistance to it suggests they may somehow pose a threat to established power.

It was the opposition’s shadow Attorney General, Robert Clarke who made the inevitable appeal to “support the troops” in claiming that the remarks “were a direct insult to Australian soldiers serving in Afghanistan”; this from a man who should realise their presence there is illegal. Here again, we have remarks reflecting a failure to realise that a public increasingly unhappy about an ongoing involvement in Afghanistan, even those who find offensive any reference to the ongoing murder and maiming of Afghan civilians, may be inclined to consider that it would mean something far worse than an “insult” to Australian soldiers if indeed, it should emerge that they are fighting a war for profit for oil companies based on a lie (particularly if there is little sign of an Australian share in the spoils falling to influential people)..

Losing Their Grip

In general, the organizations of the left/progressive movements have been tirelessly relentless in their persistence in tactics that are now obviously failing, if they ever were successful. (Why?) The unbelievable stupidity of engaging in absurd antics to attract the attention of corrupt, corporate, mainstream media to their causes is still evident and demonstrations are still the tactic of choice despite the now obvious indifference of governments to the numbers and to emerging public disillusion, not only with these forms of dissent, but to the political process in general. The people who own western capitalism on the other hand maintain and apply a knowledge base that grows with experience and usually adapt their methods. Their resort to overworn tactics for stifling debate is unusually inept and suggests that in spite of their now universal daily access to the minds of the masses they are losing their grip.

Given the now widespread awareness of:

• The fallacy of “liberation” of Iraq
• The absence of WMD
• The transfer of Iraqi oil reserves to control of US companies
• The invalid association of Iraq with Afghanistan in terrorism
• The expanded US influence in the Middle East as a result of these wars
• The many other exposed dishonesties involved in initiating them
• UN opposition to them
• Their now obvious and widely acknowledged illegality
• The PNAC call for a “new Pearl Harbour”
• The ongoing racism, violence and savagery against the civilian populations,

and many other matters that are under discussion outside the realm of the corporate mainstream media, it seems all the more surprisingly inept that the establishment reflexes are resorting to tactics of silencing debate.

Given the vast amount of material now available outside the realm of the corporate mainstream media, which not only discredits the official account but also points strongly to the “inside job” conclusion, there is a lot for inquisitive minds to discover when motivated by conspicuously suspicious attempts to silence debate. It has to be conceded that some of this material is trite rubbish; one thread of discussion even asserted that the planes that struck the towers were holograms. But people understand that there will always be this diversionary element. Indeed, it’s an acknowledged tactic in the information wars to infuse such nonsense into the opponent’s camp.

However, returning to my original point as to why 9-11 Truth has won, there is irrefutable science underpinning the key facts that point to controlled demolition. Awareness of these facts will inevitably reach and capture public opinion.

No Honour Among Thieves

We are all compromised by capitalism; it’s only a matter of degree. We are born into a system based on ownership in which all the sources of all the things we need in order to live, love and raise children are already owned, were already owned generations before we were born. Most people don’t give much thought to this; they simply learn to comply with the mechanisms of control that this system applies to them in order to serve their needs and assume the context as given. Consequently, all the way from the corrupt politician who “knows” that playing politics is like wrestling a pig and thinks “the price is worth it”, the compliant journalist who avoids any consideration that if his opinions were different he would not have a job, the many professionals who think that professionalism necessarily involves moral compromise, the soldier who kills civilians for sport and dismisses it as “his job”, the interrogator who says “The Christian in me knows it’s wrong, but the corrections officer in me just loves to see a grown man piss himself”, all the way down to ordinary Joe who knows better than to discuss politics at work, there are degrees of cooperation with the system’s immorality and a general reluctance to see ourselves in the context of the bigger picture: an evasion of responsibility for what the capitalist system we all contribute to and depend on is doing to human beings, human destiny  and the planet.

In this context the widespread acceptance of the idea that “Saddam Hussein had to be got rid of” and public concern to “liberate the people of Iraq”, despite universal indifference to their appalling suffering under 12 years of our cruel sanctions, can only be seen as wilful self deception. Similarly, the often heard argument about ‘our’ obligation to the people of Afghanistan due to the disaster that might befall them if we leave, despite the regular slaughter of Afghan civilians every day that we are there and the fact of history that in the late 1970s they had, of their own making, a more open, secular, moderate, tolerant and egalitarian society than ever they could hope for under the boot of western occupation and that it was destroyed by western meddling, is as perverse a notion as the “white man’s burden”. Australians generally understand, and with increasing stake in the nation’s economy according to their social strata, are generally committed to the idea that “if we keep in good with the US and the US gets its oil then our economy will be healthy and we will be able to pay the mortgage and upgrade the BMW next year and all will be well. – don’t rock the boat!”.

I had a very stark encounter with this one day in 2007 in a café in Bruges where I met a group of obviously affluent Australian tourists, all four of them grossly overweight and still gorging themselves on Belgian chocolates and cream-cakes. I was so disgusted with this and their self-congratulatory conversation that I was moved to take them to task over the fact of Australia’s disgraceful involvement in the war in Iraq, in consequence of which millions of Iraqis were without basic essentials, even clean water while they sat here stuffing their faces. One spluttering, red-faced, angry response that emerged obviously from some primordial, irrational, subconscious corner of this unexplored mind was “Every country has the right to defend its economy!”.  I was awestruck at what this “Freudian slip” revealed.

Notwithstanding the widespread, vehement opposition to the wars that have arisen in consequence of 9-11 the equally widespread passive, silent coalescence and even support of the kind that parrots the obviously flawed arguments in support of them, is in fact complicity; people who are wilfully deceived or unwilling to voice contrary opinions because they are compromised by their share in the spoils – the paltry crumbs that fall from the table, however vile the crimes that brought the loaf to be cut.

But the wealth gap has been widening for the past 30 years and the rate at which it widens is becoming extreme. The privatisation and increased charging for essential resources, the growth in regressive taxation, tax havens and concessions for the wealthy, the shift of government expenditure from health care, education and public services to infrastructure amenities for capital, corporate subsidies, football stadiums and other sweeteners to established wealth and capital are creating massive exclusion. The suburbs of cities have become people farms full of welfare dependants kept ill educated and ignorant by decrepit and decaying education systems whilst ill informed and diverted by television “news and entertainment”. Greed and corruption in both the government and private sectors has rendered impossible any hope or desire to correct the situation and people of wealth with any vestigial capacity for moral reflection sigh a “ho hum” at the depravity of their advantage. Meanwhile the global, economic ship is already faltering on the rocks of corruption, financial incompetence, outstripped energy resources and a declining, overheating biosphere.

The Effect of Emerging Truth

Kevin Bracken is a prominent person who has voiced key points in the public domain:

• The attacks only worked because the US Government was in some way involved
• It couldn't have happened unless there was participation from key elements of the American military and government and security services
• The official story for September 11 doesn't stack up
• The buildings were imploded
• Aviation fuel doesn't get hot enough to melt steel and no high rise steel frame building before or after September 11 has ever collapsed due to fire
• If they want to stop terrorism they've got to look at who was really behind September 11,

These points are only a fragment and have all been said before but very little repeated in the mainstream media – by contrast with the opposite views.  They are being met with demands to “shut up” based on hollow and illogical claims they are insulting and disrespectful and unfounded assertions they are stupid and wrong. The union movement, of which Kevin Bracken is an executive, is being chastened into “damage control” with officials being compelled to publicly distance themselves from Bracken’s remarks, which serves only to reinforce the sense of public figures being coerced by power into alignment with the accepted, official wisdom, a phenomenon that has been starkly evident since September 12^th 2001.

But even as Bracken was speaking callers were phoning in to ask such things as “I think if you've seen the videos of [one tower] - nothing hit it and it fell down. I mean, what's the story there?" or to assert “The investigation was a joke and most thinking people agree”.  Similarly, despite the silence of mainstream media about the facts supporting views contrary to the official explanation, information is circulating and two (of some 500) comments on an Australian, online publication of the story (one of them incidentally from a reader in the US) made the following significant points:

a)      World Trade Center 7, a 47-story skyscraper that would have been the tallest building in 35 states and was nearly a football field in length and 140 feet wide, came down in about 7 seconds at 5:20 pm on 9/11 at freefall acceleration for over 100 feet. The only way an object can fall at freefall acceleration is through air. WTC 7 had 58 perimeter columns and 25 core columns that would have had to [be] removed simultaneously on 8 floors in order for freefall to have occurred. WTC 7 had fires on only a few floors; fires that persisted in any given place for only 20-30 minutes. Ordinary office fires (and jet fuel fires, although WTC 7 was not hit by a plane) cannot exceed 1,000 ºC. Steel is an excellent heat sink and does not reach the same temperature as a fire except over a prolonged period of time. The fire proofing for WTC 7 was not compromised.

b)      Even members of the US Govt’s own 9/11 Commission who wrote the official version of events have now labelled the official story a fabrication. The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission now tells us that the official version of 9/11 was all based on false testimony and documents and is almost entirely untrue. John Farmer, Dean of Rutger Universities' School of Law and former Attorney General of New Jersey, Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission was responsible for drafting the original flawed 9/11 report. In his book released last year: The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11, the author builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version is almost entirely untrue... Farmer states clearly in his book... at some level of the government, at some point in time there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened...On that basis alone, even putting aside the compelling scientific evidence that the planes did not bring down the 3 World Trade Centre Buildings, Kevin Bracken is quite rightly calling for a proper investigation so that the truth be known.

Bracken is not alone. Intellectuals all over the world and even members of the Japanese and European parliament, not to mention the “unmentionable” Iranian President Ahmadinejad have publicly voiced doubts or urged debate about 9-11.

What this points to is that there is a widespread public debate going on, despite its invisibility in the mainstream media. It’s a highly informed and astute debate that is sorting the grain from the chaff and there are some substantial facts that this debate will inevitably bring to widespread acceptance with potent impact.

It points to the old saying that you can fool some of the people all the time and even all of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. The time is fast approaching when very few of the people are fooled by all the adamant, hollow assertion of the official 9-11 conspiracy theory, or cowered into submission by the bullying coercion of its powerful adherents.

As one Australian trade union official said, regardless of the leadership compliance with demands to distance themselves from Bracken’s remarks, and even question his future in the movement, his comments have kindled renewed, intense debate within the movement and no doubt also among its rank and file membership.

Airing the Linen

The Bush era and the consequent ten years of war have fomented intense international disenchantment with the US. In Australia, the once widespread enchantment with all things America has shrunk to the confines of the entrepreneurial and affluent middle class. The inevitable debate about 9-11 will occur in this context and there is a lot of unclean linen associated with US involvement in Australian domestic political and economic affairs, past and present, which may be dragged out for airing.

Bracken’s comments are just one significant breach of the dam. There will be others, many others, because the world is full of people who will dare to ask for more than a world run by psychopathic criminals; people who can inflict pain suffering, injury, even death without empathy, compassion or remorse. As the debate goes on outside the compliant mainstream media it will intensify because it comes from a human spirit full of imagination and creative energy that lives outside the artificial confines of a bogus social system dominated by people who manipulate it to their own designs and indulgence, people who, by their very lack of scruple, circumspect or conviction for anything other than the accumulation of wealth, rise to dominate it and, having done so, corrupt and coerce others to their own image.

The change is coming. The flood will come.

 In Australia, as in other places, there will be wider ramifications.