THE TRUTH DEFICIT

I think the American public is not aware their opinions are being manipulated.  But they are, and there are powerful forces, especially in this town [Washington DC] who spend an enormous amount of time and money trying to figure out how to manipulate American opinion towards their own objectives.

Former Congressman Lee Hamilton, co-chair of the 9/11 Commission

That’s an understatement, if ever I saw one. The term ‘fake news’, concocted to discredit the alternative media, applies with far greater force to the mainstream media that promulgated it, because the mainstream is supposedly us. The claim on which their reputations stand is that they tell us the truth. Yet, on matters of the gravest importance they do not. They are mouthpieces for an elite whose agenda they unquestioningly support, regardless of what is actually happening on the ground. The invasion of Afghanistan; of Iraq; of Libya; of Syria? It was all mapped out before 9/11. We are so enmeshed in their lies that we simply will not believe the extent to which we are being hoodwinked.

Inevitably, my latest post – of which this is the second in this short series - has generated one or two polite rebukes, principally that, if I’m suggesting alternative truths, my chosen links are insufficiently authoritative. 

This is entirely to be expected. Connecting dots is what we all do, incessantly, to make (note that word) sense of our world. We all connect our dots in different ways, depending on our prior experience and what we’re looking for. The fact that two people will look at apparently the same evidence and yet come to different conclusions is what got me started on this entire blog.  The view that reality is in some meaningful sense objective is a very useful theory, but people are at last coming to realise that it is without empirical foundation.

The bedrock claim of critical philosophy, going back to Kant, is simple: We can never have certain knowledge about the world in its entirety. Claiming to know the truth is therefore a kind of assertion of power.

These ideas animate the work of influential thinkers like Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida, and they’ve become axiomatic for many scholars in literary studies, cultural anthropology and sociology.

From these premises, philosophers and theorists have derived a number of related insights. One is that facts are socially constructed. People who produce facts — scientists, reporters, witnesses — do so from a particular social position (maybe they’re white, male and live in America) that influences how they perceive, interpret and judge the world.

Casey Williams, “Has Trump Stolen Philosophy’s Critical Tools”, The Stone, NYT, 17 April, 2017

What you see as the truth must in many significant ways be different from what I see as the truth.  There is no objective arbiter to decide who is ‘right’.  There is, at best, only informed opinion, i.e. our authorities.  

This proposition doesn’t sit well with the scientifically minded. Without an objective world, how would we communicate at all? they ask. Well, we communicate solely by means of what we have in common. We constantly seek confirmation from those around us that we see what they see. The rest is simply terra incognita as far as communication is concerned.  What we disparagingly label ‘indoctrination’ is in large part essential to enjoying the advantages of cooperation, and it’s what governments do – perhaps have to do - all the time, principally through the organs of our recognised authorities, which of course include the mass media as well as the schools. We consequently call our own indoctrination ‘education’, because we know which side our bread is buttered. Our resistance to ideas contrary to our indoctrination is what Robert Pirsig calls our ‘cultural immune system’.  ‘Conspiracy theories’ are examples of such ideas, and the condescension with which the term is used demonstrates one way our immune system counteracts them. The mainstream media will not and indeed cannot treat such subjects with fairness. Instead, they must mark off the borders of acceptable belief with the guideposts of ridicule. At least instinctively, we are all aware of this. And thus the charade – the conspiracy, in fact - of a single, one-is-for-all ‘truth’ continues.

So when one critic offered me a list of ten ‘reliable’ news outlets, I applied the litmus test that interests me most: their take on 9/11. As  expected, they all confined themselves to criticising government actions that occurred after the event (handling of dust inhalation victims, the rush into Iraq, the escalating cost of the war against terror, etc), thus safely skirting the need to challenge the core of the official narrative, which they all accepted completely uncritically.

Yet the government version of the 9/11 event is as full of holes as a cheese grater.  How could they possibly claim to be objective, fair and impartial, and yet all see it exactly the same way?  We the public are not invited to examine the evidence (all of which was anyway spirited away as quickly as possible); everything is laid out as incontestable fact.

The long-delayed report on the collapse of Tower 7 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) does essentially the same thing, ending the analysis at collapse initiation, “just”’ - as ex-NIST senior mathematician Peter Michael Ketcham complains – “as it’s getting interesting”.

“We didn’t examine the collapse sequence” defends study chief Shyam Sunder, “because there was nothing there to explain. Once initiated, collapse was inevitable”. But it’s only in the nature of the collapse itself that controlled demolition – the elephant in the room - is graphically and incontestably revealed! So NIST spent three years rigging an unconvincing computer model which would explain the collapse without looking at it.  The entire report screams cover-up!

Four years before 9/11 Noam Chomsky revealed that

The elite media set a framework within which others operate. If you are watching the Associated Press… there is something that comes along every day that says “Notice to Editors: Tomorrow’s New York Times is going to have the following stories on the front page.” … if you’re an editor of a newspaper in Dayton, Ohio and you don’t have the resources to figure out what the news is… this tells you what the news is… These are the stories that you put there because that’s what the New York Times tells us is what you’re supposed to care about tomorrow... If you get off line, if you’re producing stories that the big press doesn’t like, you’ll hear about it pretty soon… So there are a lot of ways in which power plays can drive you right back into line if you move out. If you try to break the mold, you’re not going to last long. That framework works pretty well, and it is understandable that it is just a reflection of obvious power structures.

                          ‘What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream’,                                            Noam Chomsky, 1997

                                  

A classic case is the global warming narrative. Al Gore did an excellent job getting everyone on the same page about that. His authority, as the United States President manqué, was unassailable. The until then little-known field of climate science suddenly became a magnet for funds and, just as for 9/11, all interpretations of the data which contradicted the mainstream version were ridiculed and silenced. Consequently your own view, I am sure, is unassailably that purveyed by the mainstream media, namely, that global warming is largely a man-made phenomenon.

Watching the video linked below will therefore provoke your cultural immune system. The title alone will turn you off. Please resist this.  You will be rewarded – as I was – with some real climate science, as well as getting a glimpse behind the scenes at how science is massaged into the shape that the elite want. Food and health ‘science’, as you may be aware, are following exactly the same path.  Here’s the movie.

“But wait a minute!” I hear you object. “Who is to say that this stuff is more truthful than what Al Gore told us?” Ok; the manipulation of belief primarily takes the form of the suppression, or misrepresentation of evidence. The Al Gore warming argument is captivatingly simple, as all effective messages to the masses must be: global temperatures and CO2 appear to move in lockstep though the millennia. In fact, as you saw, he got it backwards, and it is anyway considerably more complicated than that. So Gore didn’t give us all the ‘facts’, only those which supported his case, and he distorted those.  The juggernaut of the mass media then did the rest. How were we to know? To call the alternative the ‘better’ argument is to be persuaded first by its refutation of the Al Gore narrative, then by its greater comprehensiveness and consequent explanatory power, together with the combined, legitimate authority of the distinguished scientists who put it forward, and their reputations courageously on the line. There is also much wry irony, even as there is a significant absence of ridicule. But celebrity trumps science in the public mind, so Al Gore, with the united backing of the mainstream media, wins.

How long has all this been going on? Well, I began this series with a quote from then CIA Director William Casey, who back in 1981 announced that the aim of The Firm was to completely enmesh the American public in a web of fiction. Clearly he wasn’t just getting started (Casey, BTW, drowned under extremely suspicious circumstances in the Potomac River.  He who lives by the sword dies by the sword). I gave links in the first post of this series to the most conspicuous of the government fairy tales, and attach them again here - 

The Pearl Harbor attack (1941), 

the Roswell incident (1947),

the assassination of JFK (1963), 

the Gulf of Tonkin incident (1964), 

the death of Princess Diana(1997),

the 9/11 event (2001), 

the invasion of Iraq (2003),

the 7/7 bombings in London (2005); 

the bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City(1995), 

the TWA Flight 800 disaster (1996), and 

the Sandy Hook massacre (2012). 

And we can I think with confidence add the Assad Syrian ‘sarin gas attacks’ ‘of  2013 and just the other day  (also linked at the top).    

Ok, these particular links aren’t everyone’s choice, but I put it to you, have our mainstream authorities provided in any of these cases even a small fraction of the evidence to support their position that has been amassed here to refute it? The JFK assassination link alone, though arguably overstating Kennedy’s virtues (not a criticism we would level at the mass media, so why here?) and regardless of the sketchiness of some details, lays out such a wealth of evidence it would be evasive in the highest degree to complain that it therefore fails to overthrow the findings of the infamous Warren Report. The evidence it presents, like that for 9/11 and indeed for 7/7 (regardless of the source), is overwhelming.

So when did it all start? After WW1 America was becoming formally more democratic, more diverse, less manageable. It was “going to be harder to run things as a private club. Therefore, obviously, you have to control what people think,” continued Noam Chomsky in the above-quoted lecture. “In 1928’, he went on, “Edward Bernays wrote Propaganda”.

This is the main manual of the public relations industry. Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an authentic Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala. 
     His major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke…  He got enormous praise for that. 

                                 ‘What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream’, 

                                  Noam Chomsky, 1997

Then, in 1932 Aldous Huxley published his Brave New World. The novel anticipated developments in reproductive technology, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning, but, though prescient, it was set in a safely distant, utopian future (London, in 2540).

Orson Welles’ adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of The Worlds was broadcast over the radio in 1938, and caused a public outcry. Its news-bulletin format – apparently announcing an alien invasion - was thought deceptive by newspapers and public figures, and led to calls for regulation. It also again demonstrated the potential power of mass media in molding public opinion and behaviour, and money began to pour into government research on the role of mass media in that endeavor. Suddenly the mass media became an instrument by which the elite, who had always (as Chomsky notes) run things to their own advantage, could manipulate the beliefs of their populations.

In 1949 George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four, some 35 years before the putative arrival of the fictional dystopia it depicted. Even when the actual year was reached and Casey had by then announced the disinformation objectives of the CIA the public in general was still far from convinced that what Orwell warned about was happening, except of course in the ‘indoctrinated’ societies of the USSR and China.

Back in 1961, then outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower had himself warned

Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals. 

    

But his warning went unheeded. What was he referring to, people wondered? After all, by its very nature, the manipulation of public opinion and knowledge is a secret undertaking. And therein lies our dilemma: how are we to awaken to something that is run in secret by the very people who manage us? What if the manipulation involves lies? With all the secrecy, how are we the public ever to know? We have to trust our authorities! The integrity of the source of information is paramount in the operation of a democracy. Yet the Center for Public Integrity lists no fewer than 935 lies told to the American public by senior government officials (Bush, Powell, Rumsfeld, Fleisher, Wolfowitz, Rice, Cheney, and McClellan) in the run up to the invasion of Iraq – an event the Neo-Cons in the Bush cabinet wanted, and were prepared to go to any lengths to obtain. 

   The National Security Agency Headquarters

Aside from the cover-ups and false flag operations linked above and in my previous post, what other monstrous secrets affecting our future might the U.S. Government be hiding? Where there’s smoke there’s fire. During his administration then President Ronald Regan publicly mentioned no fewer than three times war with aliens from outer space as a way of settling our international animosities. War with aliens?

Then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared the day before 9/11 that $2.3 trillion dollars had gone missing from the Pentagon budget, and ‘could not be accounted for’.  The amount has since grown, vastly. To fund what? ‘The books are cooked routinely, year after year after year,’ explains Franklin C. Spinney, DOD Analyst.

In its 10-year search-and-destroy mission against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, the United States has spent more than $450 billion primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

That does not count the price tag of the war in Iraq, where Americans footed the bill for another $800 billion since the 2003 invasion.

Nor does it include the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on improving homeland security at airports, ports and other facilities. Nor mammoth increases in the yearly defense and intelligence budgets. Nor the massive projected costs of two wars that have already left some 50,000 American troops killed or wounded.

While symbolic, the death of bin Laden is likely to do little to slow down the costs of war. “If the overall war FY2012 request of $132 billion is enacted,” concludes the Congressional Research Service, “war funding since the 9/11 attacks would reach $1.415 trillion.”

                                                        Source:  Center for Public Integrity

In 2010 the Washington Post published a series entitled Top Secret America. It began with the following statement –

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no-one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

It listed 1,271 government organisations and 1,931 private companies working on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in 10,000 locations across the United States. It said an estimated 854,000 people have top-secret security clearances.

In the executive summary of the U.S. House of Representatives’ 2004 investigation into secrecy in the post 9/11 world ushered in by the George W. Bush administration, we read

…laws that are designed to promote public access to information have been undermined, while laws that authorize the government to withhold information or to operate in secret have repeatedly been expanded. The cumulative result is an unprecedented assault on the principle of open government.

Did this picture change one iota during the Obama Administration?

The self-described “most transparent administration in history” declined to say how much it seeks to bill taxpayers for individual spy agencies as part of President Barack Obama's final budget request to Congress.

Disclosing any agency-specific information -- such as whether the controversial National Security Agency or lesser-known National Reconnaissance Office won backing for a raise or a cut -- “could harm national security,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said Tuesday in a press release.

                                                                   U.S..News, Feb.9 2016

Taken altogether, this is a picture of government shrouded in such secrecy that it has become all but unaccountable to the tax payers who unwittingly fund it. 

The Government which routinely betrays your trust on vitally important issues is now completely out of your hands. Why all this secrecy? You might be forgiven for suspecting that we are the uninformed participants in a vast, unfolding social engineering experiment.

Pablo