This Clip Deserves More Attention: 911 Commissioner Bob Kerrey claims 911 was a 30 year conspiracy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDfm3NroVG8

911 Commissioner Bob Kerrey claims 911 was a 30 year conspiracy

Bob Kerrey

I think what he's acknowledging is that al CIAda evolved from the Muhajadeen.

Here's author Doug Valentine with some background on Kerrey: http://www.counterpunch.org/2001/05/17/fragging-bob/

Also the "Crazies"

Also the "Crazies" Cheney and Rumsfeld and other Neocons got their feet into the White House by way of Gerald Ford.

A Great Article on Kerrey

Thank you, ACofD! That is a great article about Kerrey and about the Vietnam war. However, it suggests that the tide against which we struggle is very broad, deep, and long-lived. It is a tide of evil kept afloat by decades of effort from multiple generations. Is it an entity or a genetic perversion in the hearts of men? Are we struggling "at the flood" or is the tide about to turn? Can the wings of a butterfly change the tide, because I now begin to grasp how vast the forces are that oppose us and see that we are armed only with butterfly wings.

"...it suggests

"...it suggests that the tide against which we struggle is very broad, deep, and long-lived."

I think this article -- also authored by Valentine -- sums up and analyzes the current predicament as well as any I've seen:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-greatest-covert-operation-ever-the-politics-of-terror-as-the-business-of-terror/20830

The Beginning Is Here by Zen Gardner - Apr 26, 2015

http://www.zengardner.com/beginning/

The Beginning Is Here

by Zen Gardner - Apr 26, 2015

“Is everything a conspiracy? No, just the important stuff.” – Jeff Wells

by Zen Gardner

Waking up to the realities presented before us and even more importantly what they imply is a very profound and personal experience. Once we become aware we are living in a world that’s been deliberately fabricated in ways we never would have imagined and that even our own true nature is anything but what we’ve been told, there’s no turning back.

It may appear to be a lonely path at first, but we are by no means alone in this awakening. It is happening in all walks of life. Whether a banker or corporate employee wakes up to the scam being perpetrated on humanity and pulls out of the matrix, or a normal taxpaying worker realizes they’re contributing to a military industrial machine hell bent on control and world domination, we’re all the same.

And those are just surface issues compared to the deliberate suppression of man’s innate spiritual nature, whether we call it social liberty or the simple freedom to create and manifest as we truly are. Not the least of which control mechanisms we are faced with is religion which works hand in hand with this suppression of humanity. All part of this repressive, controlling matrix.

Triggers for Awakening

There are many such triggers that wake people up. Once someone realizes, for example, how the world was scammed on 9/11 and that the powers that be are willing to continue to perpetrate such atrocities to promote their agenda, the digging begins. When we realize we seem to be at the complete mercy of parasitic central bankers more than willing to not only implode the world’s economy, but finance both sides of any conflict for personal gain and control, and that our governments are complicit in this scheme, we start to grasp the enormity of what befalls us.

That we have rapidly evolved into an advanced militarized surveillance police state is driving many to ask some hard questions – and the answers can be startling and difficult to swallow, especially when you realize they’re attempting to cut off all avenues of recourse....more:http://www.zengardner.com/beginning/

Gets much of it right, but

While Valentine makes some excellent points (as usual), I also find that, here and there, he unfortunately conveys some key misconceptions that have long worked in the service of the powers-that-be. Here's what I mean:

'The two political parties represent the people....' (Substitute 'co-opt' for 'represent,' then I would agree.)

'...Democrats favor labor.' (Give me a break. While labor voters still favor Democrats, it's been a long time since the party can truly be said to have returned this support with something other than kicks in the teeth. Or should I just forget about the Wall Street bailouts, NAFTA and TPP?)

'...the right-wing ideologues who rule the National Security State....' [are looking] 'to stamp out....Liberalism.'

Valentine is surely correct that the class dimension is crucial to understanding how we're really governed, and why the state sponsors terrorism. Taken together, though, passages such as these encourage what I consider to be misleading myths--specifically:

That what Valentine refers to as the National Security Establishment (a.k.a., the deep state, the gangster state, the state-within-the-state, etc.) is to be identified at the political level with just one of the major parties (the Republicans);

that the drive to dominate the world for the benefit of wealthy U.S. interests is to be identified solely with neocons;

that 'liberalism' is something wholly outside this establishment, and supposedly in opposition to this drive for world domination.

All of which suppositions, implied or otherwise, need to be looked at skeptically. For example, if a president of either major party were to invade Iran or Syria, does anyone really think that the other party would oppose it? You might have some 'debate' over how the decision-making or the shaping of public opinion could have been done better, but that would be it. How could anyone expect otherwise, after the Democrats continued to support the Iraq invasion, even after it was known that the Bush administration's WMD claims were untrue? After they continue policies of supporting Muslim extremist groups (just as they've done since the mujahideen were set up in Afghanistan under Carter), then citing these same groups as a justification for increased US militarization in the region?

Here I've been talking about the situation within the political establishment; but I think there are parallels to the state of liberalism as one finds it today in certain media outlets and in public opinion. Listen to the PBS / NPR / Huffington Post crowd (feel free to add other examples), and one will hear the needlessly derogatory use of the term 'conspiracy theory' applied to critiques of the National Security Establishment such as that offered by Valentine. The stated purposes of U.S. foreign policy are accepted at face value, and thus it is assessed only in terms of 'competence,' of whether it is 'working' or not--never, ever in terms of imperialism and class interest.

These are the kind of opinions that are in harmony with the aims of neocons, not something that the latter have any need to 'stamp out.'

One might object that this is all due not to sympathy with the National Security Establishment, but rather to being in a state of denial about what's really happening. While I think that's probably true of a lot of what I've referred to, the effect is just the same regardless, in that it plays a vital part in helping these policies along. And this refusal to wake-up-and-smell- the-fascism is, I'm afraid, not some temporary shortcoming of liberalism, but has become a basic characteristic of it.

"'The two political parties

"'The two political parties represent the people....' (Substitute 'co-opt' for 'represent,' then I would agree.)"

"'...Democrats favor labor.' Give me a break..."

Your observations are intuitively valid and alert, rm, but be careful.

The key here (having read all of Doug's books, many articles and heard numerous interviews) is that he is referring to the ostensible relationship and perception, not the fact. Differentiating between the stated vs. the unstated goals and objectives of the state and its various policies and bureaucracies is one of Doug's hallmark contributions to these discussions. His credibility stems from the work he's done in understanding how organizations like the CIA (or the 'war on drugs', etc.) are actually organized.

For those following this thread I highly recommend Doug's recent interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J80UC34SH8c

What I find most interesting about Valentine's work is that while I've yet to hear him opine on the official 9/11 narrative, one discovers that the 9/11 particulars are not necessary to grasping the essentials of the forces involved, their history and goals (both stated and unstated) and the likely outcomes.

Appreciated

Thanks, AConfederacyofDunces, I appreciate your comments.

The distinction between ostensible and actual is a crucial one, and while it's there in much of Valentine's piece, I didn't get a sense of it in the passages that I cited.

If I may come across as hyper-vigilant, it is only because I think that these illusions concerning difference, choice, and 'debate' are of such enormous significance that the point that they ARE illusions can't be made emphatically enough. With too many people, including a number of supposed critics of the system, still accepting them (or at least implying acceptance of them) more or less at face value, they do not simply result in ineffectual opposition to the national security establishment, but have come to constitute a basic component of its ongoing operation.