Photo byAndrea Booher/ FEMA News Photo
9/11 events were bad; aftermath much worse
THE TRUTH HOUND/ The Big Picture
Whether you’re talking about the harrowing events of 9-11 that sparked the modern “war on terror,” the true causes of the two world wars, or the real facts behind the WACO massacre and other harmful events and developments, there’s a common denominator that frustrates our efforts to assess reality, achieve justice and solve our problems: The media.
A media that withholds and distorts, a media that lies, is a media that kills. Take New York Times Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty. In the 1930s, he denied the Ukrainian famine. The world believed him. Some 10 million people starved. His Pulitzer Prize for his Ukraine coverage was never withdrawn.
Clearly, a media that spreads disinformation to us about pivotal events, or stays silent when there’s an imperative to accurately speak out, is not simply a passive barrier to progress; it’s an active menace to civilization.
Notably, this dire situation, which I described at a 15th anniversary 9-11 program held in Austin, Texas, comprises a book I am developing on “Weaponized Media.” Thanks goes to 9-11 Truthfest (see video archive of Truthfest at this link) videographer and activist Ron Avery and to several others who helped organize the event.
Besides conveying insights on the actual events of 9-11, the over-arching message in Austin was the instrumental role of the mainstream media in justifying, sustaining and worsening war in general and the war on terror specifically. This spotlights the fact that this corrosive role of the media is so deeply embedded in the political machinery that, for all intents and purposes, the media is an actual weapon.
That stark realization naturally led to discussion at Truthfest about the urgent need for a new media. Perhaps, as some suggested, independent outlets could confederate to amplify their impact against a multi-billion-dollar media establishment owned by a half-dozen or so billionaire family interests.
Over the last couple years, especially, more people are realizing that we’re not dealing with a mere “liberal” or “plutocratic” press. Rather, it has evolved into a high-tech Weaponized Media that kills free speech under the guise of practicing it, and fosters the harming and killing of people under the guise of serving them—representing a magnitude of institutional failure that we’re just beginning to measure, if it can be measured.
And with such a media, we’re talking about a “disinformation assault” against the psyche of the domestic U.S. population itself that runs the full gamut: psychological warfare, cultural warfare, economic warfare and, via our twisted foreign “policy,” military “wars” that are just police actions against a shadowy enemy. Once we crossed the 9-11 threshold 15 years ago, it became clear that WAR IS NOW A PERMANENT FIXTURE.
We are akin to POWs living within the disinformational “barracks” upheld by the media moguls who are acting as the “wardens” of our mental state. Consequently, we’re trapped in a metaphysical matrix comprised of dead-ends and false alternatives.
More specifically, whenever the media cover up or drastically downplay vicious Israeli bombings of the Gaza Strip, that helps nullify a public backlash and enables those airstrikes to continue and massacre even more innocent children; whenever Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s remarks or intentions are misrepresented in the press, NATO exercises near Russia’s border intensify. Apparently the prospect of facing the “war on terror” and “Cold War 2.0” with Russia at the same time is not daunting enough for a media that seems to relish in eternal conflict.
A Weaponized Media works in many ways. Besides frightening us into wars on the basis of lies, it keeps us in the dark about perhaps the most fundamental problem of all that sparks all the rest of the problems: the debt-based monetary system where each dollar is created by the banking cartel as unpayable debt that’s owed to the very same cartel, based on fraud.
Being kept in the dark in that regard means we’re all being held captive within this privately-owned, secretly-run money system that relentlessly exerts tremendous debt-induced harm by creating a predatory culture and a nearly hopeless sense of real progress, even as the big banks steal our credit and money and loan it back to us at interest. This casts the vast majority of us into a bleak “rat race” of lifelong toil, strife, broken dreams and shattered marriages. This aspect covers economic and cultural/social warfare.
Not to mention how the big media is always selling us on the drug-based allopathic medical system that annually kills 250,000 people—the equivalent of nearly ten 9-11s per year—just through malpractice. That’s saying nothing of the dangerous vaccines uncritically marketed by the media. Furthermore, Weaponized Media also label truth-seekers as dissident “conspiracy theorists,” which neutralizes real inquiry.
Lacking real independence and bereft of a moral backbone, the media then resort to clinical stories such as USA Today’s epic Sept. 14 front-page piece: “Battling Islamic State: Inside Command Center,” which involved reporters entering a Qatar command center and discerning the detached target decision-making process. Readers learn how “careful” the Air Force is not to kill too many civilians in a war on terror that is on autopilot just as much as the bomb-dropping drones are, apart from the fact that the post 9-11 wars were never constitutionally declared and are being conducted in a manner that makes victory undefinable, and therefore unattainable.
USA Today’s cold stats would make famed 1984 author George Orwell wince: 15,000 air strikes since 2014; 55 “confirmed” civilian deaths since 2014; 496 bombs or other munitions dropped per week this year alone. No mention of the total disregard for Syria’s sovereignty; no mention that the overall conflict there, airstrikes included, has killed far more kids and adults—those that haven’t been driven into Europe, that is, hungry, injured and homeless.
Interestingly, the Weaponized Media became clearly recognizable stateside over 100 years ago during the Yellow Journalism days, when William Randolph Hearst battled “competitor” Joseph Pulitzer in scaring America into the Spanish-American War, even though the Spanish blood that both newspaper magnates screamed for stemmed from the unproven premise that Spain sunk the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbor—the “9-11” of its day. Historically, there are even more disturbing examples of malicious media malpractice, here and abroad.
And so it goes. A media that, through its National Election Pool, sequesters and controls the vote count, that helps keep the usurious money-creation process secret, that won’t fess-up about vaccination dangers—and ridicules honest inquiry rather than practicing it—must be shunned and eventually replaced. The events of 9-11 were bad. The aftermath is worse.