The control of thought

If you don’t read the newspapers, you are uninformed. If you do read them, you are misinformed. (Mark Twain)
It’s our job to control exactly what people think . . . . Mika Brzezinski (MSNBC)

The control of thought by the elite is as old as the hills.

Over 2,300 years ago the Greek philosopher Plato dealt with the problem of how hierarchical societies ensure that people did not think ‘incorrectly’, using his Allegory of the Cave, described in Book VII of his Republic. The allegory takes the form of an imaginary conversation between Socrates and his pupil, Glaucon.

Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine people living in a huge cave that is only open to the outside world with difficulty. Most of the people in the cave are prisoners since early childhood. They are chained to the wall, facing the back of the cave, unable to move so they cannot turn their heads to see a fire behind them. Between the prisoners and the fire is a low wall, behind which is a path along which non-prisoners carry puppets and other objects that cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The shadows playing on the wall are all the prisoners can see; unable to see the fire, the prisoners believe the shadows to be real.

The central message of Plato’s allegory is that the human-created shadows are the political doctrine of a nation state.

Although that was over two millennia ago, the cave allegory is more relevant today than ever. Industrial society is living in a state of deep ignorance, in which ‘reality’ is created by powerful agencies and their puppeteers, the media.

As Plato saw it, an important element in social control was a noble lie, a myth deliberately propagated by an elite, described in Book III of The Republic.

2,300 years later, nation states are finding it harder to convince people of the reality of the shadows in the modern version of Plato’s cave. Indeed, the history of the 20th and (so far) 21st centuries has been a series of noble lies, perpetrated by an elite, deeply corrupted by power.

An important tool in this has been the sophisticated use of psychology. Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, is widely regarded as the father of ‘public relations’, the polite term for the manipulation of public opinion. In his 1928 book Propaganda he wrote:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country…it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world. This is merely a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organised.”

38 years later, Harvard history professor Carroll Quigley published an extraordinary 1300-page book Tragedy and Hope, and in 2016 Joseph Plummer published a condensed 200 page version, Tragedy and Hope 101. Quigley reveals that real political power operates in secret, over which ‘democratic’ elections have little or no influence. He shows that secret, powerful networks of individuals (hence referred to as The Network) are behind world events, and that “representative government” is a fraud.

Plummer summarises the situation:

• Real power is unelected. Politicians change, but the power structure does not. The Network operates behind the scenes, for its own benefit, without ever consulting those who are affected by its decisions.
• The Network is composed of individuals who prefer anonymity. They are “satisfied to possess the reality rather than the appearance of power.” This approach of secretly exercising power is common throughout history because it protects conspirators from the consequences of their actions.
• A primary tactic for directing public opinion and ‘government’ policy is to place willing servants in leadership positions of trusted institutions (media, universities, government, foundations, etc.). If there is ever a major backlash against a given policy, the servant can be replaced. This leaves both the institution and the individuals who actually direct its power unharmed.
• Historically, those who establish sophisticated systems of domination are not only highly intelligent; they are supremely deceptive and ruthless. They completely ignore the ethical barriers that govern a normal human being’s behavior. They do not believe that the moral and legislative laws, which others are expected to abide by, apply to them. This gives them an enormous advantage over the masses that cannot easily imagine their mind-set.
• Advances in technology have enabled modern rulers to dominate larger and larger areas of the globe. As a result, the substance of national sovereignty has already been destroyed, and whatever remains of its shell is being dismantled as quickly as possible. The new system they’re building (which they themselves refer to as a New World Order), will trade the existing illusion of democratically directed government for their long-sought, “expert-directed,” authoritarian technocracy.

This disturbing reality contradicts everything our governments, education and media instil in us from cradle to grave, so it is inevitable that such ideas will be dismissed as the ravings of a crazy ‘conspiracy theorist’.

The trouble is, far from being a conspiracy nutter, Quigley was a distinguished member of the Ivy League; a pre-eminent historian who taught at Princeton and Harvard universities and an adviser to the American Defense Department and U.S. Navy.

So how did Quigley arrive at this ‘secret knowledge’? Plummer explains:

“Carroll Quigley was a well-connected and well-credentialed member of Ivy League society. Based on his own words, and his training as a historian, it appears that he was chosen by members of a secret network to write the real history of their rise to power. However, as Quigley later realized, these individuals did not expect or intend for him to publish their secrets for the rest of the world to see. Shortly after publishing Tragedy and Hope in 1966, ‘the Network’ apparently made its displeasure known to Quigley’s publisher, and the book he’d spent twenty years writing was pulled from the market”.

* * *

Examples of thought control by media abound. One of the earliest documented examples, was the reporting of British casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916.

On that one day 19,240 British soldiers were killed, the worst day in the history of the British Army.

Yet newspaper reporting was typified by headlines such as “Our casualties not heavy”.

How was this possible?

It was made possible by government legislation. Just days after the outbreak of war, parliament passed, without debate, the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) which gave the government the powers to suppress published criticism of the war, punishable by imprisonment without trial.

During the war, publishing any information not approved by the military authorities became a punishable offence. There were only five accredited war correspondents, who worked under tight scrutiny of the military. They were forbidden from writing about soldiers other than their commanding officers. At all times they were accompanied a ‘minder’ who had the authority to use chemicals in searching their dispatches for invisible ink.

In 1920 he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) for his wartime services.

After the war, some of the reporters expressed remorse at their willingness to be manipulated. William Beach Thomas, who had written for the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror, wrote of the war:

“A great part of the information supplied to us by British Army Intelligence was utterly wrong and misleading. The dispatches were largely untrue so far as they deal with concrete results. For myself, on the next day and yet more on the day after that, I was thoroughly and deeply ashamed of what I had written, for the very good reason that it was untrue. Almost all the official information was wrong. The vulgarity of enormous headlines and the enormity of one’s own name did not lessen the shame.”

And in December 1917, British prime minister David Lloyd George famously said to the then editor of the Manchester Guardian, CP Scott, in December 1917:

“If the people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know.”

No doubt such deception would have been justified as what Plato in his Republic, called a ‘noble lie’, a lie “knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony”, as Wikipedia puts it.

Throughout history, the ‘noble lie’ has been used to perpetrate wars and other atrocities.
Of course, the great majority of people don’t want war, so they have to be persuaded to fight by their leaders. During the Nuremberg trials following World War II, Hermann Göring was interviewed by psychologist Gustave Gilbert, a fluent German speaker. Under sentence of death, Göring had no reason to lie when he said that even in a democracy.

“People can always be brought to the bidding of their leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

The power of governments and their stenographer media to persuade people of the legitimacy of war is well illustrated by America’s attack on Iraq in the Gulf War in 1990-1. On August 2, 1990, Iraq forces invaded neighbouring Kuwait, and 7 months later the United States led a United Nations sanctioned “Operation Desert Storm” military response. It began on 17 January 1991, with a massive bombardment, followed by occupation of Kuwait, and then, part of Iraq.

A key event in the generating public support for U.S. military action was the ‘babies in incubator’ report, according to which Iraqi soldiers murdered Kuwaiti babies. On October 10, 1990, a 15-year old Kuwaiti girl gave tearful testimony to a hearing of the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus. She was known only by her first name, Nayirah, supposedly to protect her from Iraqi reprisals. The girl relayed a shocking story while sobbing.

“I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital. While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”

In the next three months the story of babies torn from their incubators was endlessly repeated on TV and at the UN Security Council. Of all the accusations made against the Saddam Hussein, none had greater impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers murdering Kuwaiti babies by removing them from incubators and leaving them to die on hospital floor.

There was just one problem; it never happened. John MacArthur, a reporter who investigated the role of propaganda in the Gulf War and author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, discovered that Nayirahwas a daughter of Saud Nasir al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti Ambassador in Washington, and a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family.

Even more revealing was that her testimony had been organised as part of the ‘Citizens for a Free Kuwait’ public relations campaign run by Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti government. In charge of H&K’s Washington office was Craig Fuller, who had been chief of staff to Bush when he was vice-president and had remained a close friend of the president, who had had been vociferously been using the ‘babies in incubators’ story to generate public and Congressional support for military action.

Just as effective as lying is suppression, and is well illustrated by Saddam’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in the prelude to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Ed Vulliamy, a leading reporter of The Observer newspaper, had close contact with Mel Goodman, a former CIA analyst who maintained regular contact with his former colleagues. Goodman told Vulliamy that, contrary to everything the U.S. and U.K governments were saying, Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Goodman was willing to be quoted as a named source, but The Observer refused to publish what would have been a scoop that had the potential to save thousands of lives. The paper’s editor, Roger Alton, said that “we’ve got to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Americans.”

In retrospect, Alton can be said to have contributed, albeit indirectly, to the deaths of 179 British soldiers, not to mention thousands of Iraqis, in the Iraq war.

And for those people who like to think that the media have changed their spots and are fulfilling the Fourth Estate’s role as a pillar of democracy, the media coverage of the situation in Ukraine, in which Russia is being portrayed as the aggressor is clear evidence to the contrary.

To understand what is really going on, here’s something the mainstream media (MSM) go to great trouble to avoid – background and context. In World War II the Soviet Union lost an estimated 25 million people, or 14% of its population. Of these, 12 million were military and 13 million were civilians, so the realities of war were seared into Soviet culture.

By comparison, the USA lost around 400,000 military deaths, and about 12,000 civilian deaths; or about 0.3% of the 1941 U.S. population, or 1/46th of the Soviet deaths. And not one of the few civilians who died had had their homes bombed.

The American civilian experience of war came courtesy of John Wayne, who didn’t even take part in WWII.

So, whereas American experience of war is shallow and vicarious, the Russian experience is reality-based. It is in this context that the Eastward expansion of NATO in the last 30 years should be viewed.

Central to the issue is the 1990 undertaking by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker that, as a condition for accepting German re-unification, NATO assured the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand “one inch further East”. Indeed, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported that in talks on German unification in March 1990, Western officials had made it clear to the Soviet Union that NATO would not push into territory east of Germany.
So, what was this promise worth? From 1999, 14 countries were admitted to NATO: Czechia, Hungary and Poland in 1999, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, and North Macedonia in 2020.

The charges made by Der Spiegel were repeatedly denied by the US, but a recently declassified document shows that NATO did indeed break its promise to the Soviets.

One might think that an essential item in the negotiator’s toolbox would be to put oneself the other’s position. It’s therefore not a great stretch to imagine how the U.S would feel if Russia were to install bases in Canada and Mexico.

Having trusted the U.S., Russia now finds itself almost surrounded on its Western side by NATO military bases. Yet western media failed to connect them to provide context. Given the shortness of public memory, they get away with a great deal.

Why do the media manipulate public opinion in this way? This was the subject of a 1976 investigation of the CIA by the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church. CIA director William Colby, questioned by Senate Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Otis Pike.

Pike asked Colby if people working for television networks and national news services such as Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI), were paid the CIA.

Colby said that he’d prefer to answer in executive session, which is not open to the public, but only to senators with clearance to classified information.

Concern that the CIA was a law unto itself was followed by publication of The CIA and the media in the magazine Rolling Stone, by Carl Bernstein, veteran investigative reporter of Watergate fame. Bernstein showed that the CIA had journalists implanted in all the mainstream media and by so doing were actively influencing public opinion on ‘the war on communism’ and other politically sensitive matters.

Control of the media extends to countries in the American Empire, including NATO countries, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In 2014 German journalist Udo Ulfkotte, who had been a top journalist at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, published his tell-all book Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought Journalists: How Politicians, Intelligence Agencies and High Finance Control Germany’s Mass Media). The book was an instant bestseller in Germany, despite being greeted with complete silence by the media apart from snide comments.

Of course, the media don’t always lie. Topics like sport, gardening, cookery, and contentious topics like ‘woke’ and other aspects of political correctness are generally treated fairly, but there are some matters that can be a threat to any journalist’s career, should he or she depart too far from the official narrative. These are the ‘third rail’ topics, referring to the third (‘live’) rail on underground railways, stepping upon which risks electrocution. Examples of such topics abound; particularly glaring examples are the previously mentioned Kennedy assassinations (JFK and RFK).

The media have what has been an extremely effective method of shutting down discussion of these topics; they are put in the pillory as ‘conspiracy theorists’. This is a term coined by the CIA shortly after doubts began to be expressed about the Warren Commission report into the assassination of President Kennedy. Even asking pertinent questions was enough to invite the ‘conspiracy theorist’ ridicule, putting them alongside ‘flat-earthers’ and moon landings-were-a-hoax brigade.

But the ‘conspiracy theorist’ label doesn’t work with intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell who was, until his death as Lord Russell, a world-eminent mathematician, philosopher and logician. He became interested in the JFK assassination, and published a dissenting article “16 Questions on the Assassination” in the September 1964 issue of The Minority of One. Among them were those indicated by bullet points below.

• “Why were all the members of the Warren Commission closely connected with the U.S. Government?”

The most glaring example was Allen Dulles who had been Director of the CIA until Kennedy sacked him. Kennedy had said that if he were re-elected, he would “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces”. Dulles therefore had a strong motive for revenge and should have been considered a suspect.

It was like having a prime suspect on the jury.

• “If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security?
• If the Government is so certain of its case, why has it conducted all its inquiries in the strictest secrecy?
• Why was the President’s route changed at the last minute to take him past Oswald’s place of work, and how could Oswald have known of this last-minute change?”

After the Warren Commission report, Russell formed a “Who killed Kennedy?” committee, a group of distinguished UK intellectuals including:

• John Arden, playwright
• Carolyn Wedgewood Benn, wife of Anthony Wedgewood Benn MP
• Lord Boyd-Orr, former director of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and a Nobel Prize winner
• William Empson, Professor of English Literature at Sheffield University
• Victor Golancz, publisher
• Michael Foot MP
• Kingsley Martin, former editor of the New Statesman
• Sir Compton Mackenzie
• Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University
• Kenneth Tynan, literary manager of the National Theatre.

Russell said: “We view the problem with the utmost seriousness. U.S. Embassies have long ago reported to Washington world-wide disbelief in the official charges against Oswald, but this has scarcely been reflected by the American press. No U.S. television program or mass circulation newspaper has challenged the permanent basis of all the allegations — that Oswald was the assassin, and that he acted alone. It is a task which is left to the American people”.

September 11, 2001

. . . and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they [the masses] more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.. (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol 1, Ch. 10)

The attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, are by far the most compelling, ‘in-your-face’, proof of the need for a fundamental reconstruction of one’s worldview. It involves destruction of two fundamental pillars of perceived reality:

• Governments of ‘democratic’ countries care about their citizens to the extent that their first responsibility is to protect the people who voted them into power.
• While the mainstream media (MSM) distort or exaggerate to suit the political needs of their owners, in general they do not lie on the scale implied in the above Hitler quote. In particular, they would not support mass murder or its cover-up.

I have devoted a great deal of space to 9/11 because it provides proof, if any were needed, that both these cherished beliefs are the opposite of the truth.

Whereas the anomalies in the official ‘lone gunman’ explanation were clearest to those who were prepared to dig beneath the surface, the attacks of 9/11, were televised and seen by billions round the world. 9/11 therefore provides by far the most potent means of initiating people into geopolitical issues such as the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’, and for that reason I make no apology for devoting so much space to this key issue.

Particularly significant had been the television coverage of the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers. Many people had recorded TV news footage, and some began to notice anomalies in the official narrative, some quite blatant.

Intrinsic implausibility

Prior to 9/11, no steel-framed building had collapsed due to fire – anywhere in the world. But in New York it happened three times on the same day and in the same location. The North Tower (WTC1), the South Tower (WTC2) and the Salomon Building (WTC7, which had not even been hit by an airplane), all underwent sudden, total, straight-down, collapse, into their own ‘footprints’. The following points are significant:

1. As building fires go, those at the World Trade Center were not extremely hot, as evinced by black smoke billowing from the buildings, characteristic of oxygen starvation. By comparison, the fire in the Windsor building in Madrid, Spain, completely engulfed the upper ten stories of the building. Yet most of the building remained standing.

2. Evidence for explosions. In addition to the eye-witness accounts mentioned later, compelling evidence points to the use of explosives to collapse of three of the WTC towers.

Absence of concrete in the remains. When concrete buildings collapse, the concrete is crushed into rubble, but the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of concrete in the three World Trade Center buildings were almost entirely converted to dust, which was spread over large areas of Manhattan.There were almost no concrete slabs or blocks of concrete in remains of the towers.Virtually all of it was converted to dust. According to New York governor George Pataki,“There’s no concrete. There’s very little concrete. All you see is aluminum and steel. The concrete was pulverized. And I was down here on Tuesday, and it was like you were on a foreign planet. All over lower Manhattan — not just this site — from river to river, there was dust, powder two, three inches thick. The concrete was just pulverized.”
The energy needed to convert such an enormous mass of concrete to dust far exceeds the gravitational energy of the towers. So where did the energy come from?

Explosive ejections. During the collapse of the twin towers, huge, multi-tonne girders were ejected laterally up to distances of up to 500 feet from each tower’s base. For anyone who has forgotten, gravity acts downwards.

Demolition squibs. In addition to the above, videos show explosive ejections of debris (“squibs”)from point sources, between 20 and 30 floors below the collapse front.

3. Before it collapsed, television news broadcasts showed brilliant lemon-yellow liquid pouring out of the South Tower. It was stated by government bodies (NIST, FEMA and MIT) to be molten aluminium from the plane, but its bright lemon colour indicated a temperature closer to that of steel (1500˚C) degrees) rather than aluminium (659˚C). And days after the collapse, when first responders were interviewed on television, they said they had seen large quantities of what they called ‘molten steel’:“We saw molten steel running down the channel ways – like you’re in a foundry.”TV viewers would have assumed that steel beams had melted in the jet fuelled fires, a view initially encouraged by TV commentators. But the smoke was evidence that the fires were not particularly hot, so what caused such intense heat?This remained a mystery until a group of independent scientists analysed specimens of the WTC dust that had been collected by citizens living near the World Trade Center. Analysis of the WTC dust yielded evidence of an altogether more sinister explanation. The dust was found to contain iron-rich microspheres, with diameters less than 50 micrometres. These could only have been formed from droplets of liquid iron.Evidence of how they had been formed was suggested by another discovery in the dust – unburnt ‘nanothermite’, a mixture of extremely fine (nanometre scale particles) iron oxide and aluminium powders. When ignited, these react violently to produce iron, aluminum oxide, and temperatures approaching 3000 degrees Celsius.The discovery of nanothermite in the dust explains a lot. The ‘molten steel’ observed by first responders and previously seen pouring out of South Tower before it collapsed, would not have been steel, but iron produced from iron oxide.

Now here’s the thing. Though ordinary thermite is not too difficult to obtain, nanothermite is a product of highly sophisticated technology and could not possibly be obtained by Islamists based in Afghanistan.

Foreknowledge

1. Media broadcasts. Since a fire-induced collapse of a steel-framed building would have been unprecedented, one would not have expected media to show evidence that they expected WTC7 to collapse, especially as it had not been hit by an aircraft and had only modest fires. Yet the collapse of WTC7 was reported before it happened, by both the BBC and CNN.BBC correspondent Jane Standley reported that WTC7 had collapsed, while viewers could see it was still standing behind her.And in another news video Aaron Brown of CNN says: “We are getting information now that one of the other buildings, Building 7, in the World Trade Center complex, is on fire and has either collapsed or is collapsing…”Expectation of WTC7’s collapse was not confined to the media. Police and construction workers at the site evidently expected it to collapse. In this video someone can be heard saying: “Keep your eye on that building. It’ll be coming down soon.” And “The building is about to blow up. Move it back.” And also, “We are walking back. The building is about to blow up.”And if that is not enough, first responder Kevin McPadden, an emergency medical technician, said in an interview that there was an actual countdown preceding Building 7’s collapse.

And in a national network live TV interview with ABC’s Peter Jennings, New York mayor Rudi Giuliani said he had been told that the World Trade Center was going to collapse. Yet when later confronted by independent news reporters, he denied ever being told about the collapse.

Why would he do that?

2. The “dancing Israelis”. A few minutes after the North Tower (WTC1) was struck, a New Jersey resident had her attention drawn to the destruction, which she could see across the Hudson river. Maria (who didn’t want her family name to be used), grabbed her binoculars. As she watched the disaster, she noticed three young men on the roof of a white van in the parking lot of her apartment building. She said that “they seemed to be taking a movie”. The men were taking video or photos of themselves with the World Trade Center burning in the background, she said. What struck her was that “they were like happy, you know … They didn’t look shocked to me. I thought it was very strange”.She found the behaviour so suspicious that she called the police with the license plate number of the van. Soon, the FBI arrived, and a statewide bulletin was issued on the van.The FBI found that the van belonged to a Mossad front company called Urban Moving Systems. It was located and van was pulled over, and five young Israeli men, Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari, were arrested.The police report stated that the driver had said: “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”According to ABC, The FBI’s Foreign Counterintelligence Section took over the case because they believed Urban Moving Systems was a “cover for an Israeli intelligence operation”.

When the FBI raided the company’s offices in Weehawken, N.J., the owner of the company, Dominic Suter, had fled to Israel.

The Israelis had been detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, and the men were held in detention for more than two months. Eventually, a deal was struck between Israeli and U.S. governments, and after 71 days and the five were put on a plane and deported to Israel.

Back in Israel, they appeared on an Israeli talk show and discussed their American experience. One of the men made the extraordinary statement:

“The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event.”

How can you film and photograph an event if you don’t know it’s going to happen?

3. Insider trading. In the two weeks prior to 9/11 there was a sudden and unaccountable explosion of speculative trades on the US stock and bond markets, indicating that some well-connected investors had advance knowledge of the attacks. The most significant forms of speculation are ‘put options’, in which the investor bets that a particular stock will decrease in value. In contrast, ‘call options’ are bets that the value of a stock will increase.In normal trading, put and call options fluctuate about means that roughly balance out, but in his blog “From the wilderness”, Michael Ruppert noted thatBetween September 6 and 7, the Chicago Board Options Exchange saw purchases of 4,744 put options on United Airlines, but only 396 call options. Assuming that 4,000 of the options were bought by people with advance knowledge of the imminent attacks, these “insiders” would have profited by almost $5 million.andOn September 10, 4,516 put options on American Airlines were bought on the Chicago exchange, compared to only 748 calls. Again, there was no news at that point to justify this imbalance; again, assuming that 4,000 of these options trades represent “insiders,” they would represent a gain of about $4 million.

Moreover,

On September 29, 2001 – in a vital story that has gone unnoticed by the major media – the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “Investors have yet to collect more than $2.5 million in profits they made trading options in the stock of United Airlines before the Sept. 11, terrorist attacks, according to a source familiar with the trades and market data.

“The uncollected money raises suspicions that the investors – whose identities and nationalities have not been made public – had advance knowledge of the strikes.” They don’t dare show up now. The suspension of trading for four days after the attacks made it impossible to cash-out quickly and claim the prize before investigators started looking.”

Suspicions of government involvement in 9/11 were further raised by the official 9/11 Commission Report (about which more later). Referring to the insider trading before 9/11, on page 499 the Report states (emphasis added):

“A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 . . . “

Any independent, objective inquiry into the attacks would begin with determining the identity of the terrorists, but the 9/11 Commission took the Islamic identity of the terrorists to be axiomatic.

4. Larry Silverstein, the owner of the World Trade Center complex, was extraordinarily lucky on that particular Tuesday. He and his company, Silverstein Properties, had offices on the 88th floor of the North Tower. Two of his children, Roger and Lisa, were Vice presidents of the company and three Silversteins would have been in the company’s offices. But on that particular day, all three were absent.Larry had a dermatologist’s appointment, while Roger and Lisa had been ‘running late’. Roger had been in the parking garage of WTC Building 7 when the North Tower was hit, and Lisa Silverstein had been turned away from the WTC by police.But there’s more. Geoffrey Wharton, Silverstein’s top aide, was at the 8.30 at Silverstein’s offices, but “had to cut the meeting a little short”, and went down to the lobby, minutes before Flight 11 hit the North Tower.And Howard Rubenstein, who had represented Silverstein as publicist for over 30 years, had agreed to join a meeting at 8:00 am on the 88th floor on September 11, but asked for it to be delayed, and it was rescheduled for 9 o’clock, an hour after the plane hit .So, five people – Larry Silverstein, two of his children, and two close business associates, all got lucky on that day.

5. Evidence for explosives. Embedded in the public memory are the giant fireballs produced by the aircraft crashing into the towers. Allegedly this weakened the towers sufficiently to cause them to collapse under gravity.The problem is that, as every child knows, gravity acts downwards. This makes it difficult to explain why the TV shots of the collapse of the North Tower (WTC 1) show massive steel girders weighing many tons being catapaulted sideways, one of which was embedded in the adjacent Deutsche bank building. Small wonder that the collapse of towers was not shown on TV after September 11, for it completely demolishes the official story (unless the law of gravity changed on that day).If that’s not enough, the New York Times of 29 March, 2006 reported that human bone fragments had been found on the roof of the Deutsche Bank building. A human body may be crushed, but not shattered, when a building collapses – more evidence for explosives.The Naked Emperor: Building 7Most threatening of all to the official narrative was the collapse of WTC7, because it was not hit by a plane, and the fires were relatively small. Yet at 5:20 pm it collapsed in a manner indistinguishable from controlled demolition. As Dan Rather of CBS News observed:

“For the third time today, it’s reminiscent of those pictures we’ve all seen too much on television before when a building was deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynamite to knock it down …”

While Rather was a layperson in demolition terms, Danny Jowenko, a well-known European demolition expert, was even more emphatic. Until he was interviewed by Niels Harrit, retired Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, Jowenko had not heard of WTC7 or its collapse. So when Harrit showed him a video of the collapse in an interview, Jowenko said “This is controlled demolition… a team of experts did this… This is professional work, without any doubt.” Moreover, since Jowenko was aware of how long it takes to prepare a building for controlled demolition he expressed incredulity when he was told it had collapsed on the day of 9/11. And when interviewed by telephone by a Canadian journalist, he expressed no surprise when told that demolition firms in the U.S. were noticeably reticent, for fear of future employment.

Interestingly, and possibly relevant in view of the enormity of the issue, when driving home from church just three days after his telephone interview, he was killed in a head-on crash with a tree.

Video Analysis. Definitive proof of the use of explosives in the destruction of WTC7 was provided by a careful video analysis by physicist David Chandler. His analysis proved that its collapse was close to freefall, and that for 2.25 seconds it was in exact freefall, meaning that there was no resistance holding it up. WTC 7 collapsed straight down, which means that all supports were destroyed simultaneously across the entire cross section, which can only be achieved by explosives. Not only that, in TV broadcasts on that day viewers heard officials saying that the building was expected to collapse, and one heard loud explosions.

Despite this, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), the government organisation given the responsibility for investigating the collapses of the World Trade Center towers, concluded its report that there was no evidence for the use of explosives. Yet in its final report on the collapse of WTC 7, NIST admitted that for 2.25 seconds the building was in freefall, which implies the use of explosives (though of course this was not admitted).

6. Destruction of evidence. It is a federal offence to remove anything from a crime scene, as was made clear by the then Mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani who, on September 26 banned tourists from taking photos at the WTC site on the basis that it was a crime scene.Yet almost all the WTC steel, which could have provided vital forensic information was sold to Asian scrap dealers and exported.The week after 9/11 Fire Engineering Magazine said “We are literally treating steel removed from the site like garbage, not like crucial fire scene evidence.” Adding further suspicion, in 2002 the New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, defended the removal of the steel in 2002, saying:“If you want to take a look at the construction methods and design, that’s in this day and age, what computers do. Just looking at a piece of metal generally doesn’t tell you anything.”In reality, as examination of the steel could have shown whether it had been cut by explosives. Indeed, some of the steel that had not been exported was examined showed evidence of extremely high temperatures. The May 2002 edition of the FEMA World Trade Center Building Performance Study stated that some of the steel showed evidence of extremely high temperatures.

7. Planted Evidence. The passport of Satah al Suqami who was alleged to have been on flight 11, was reportedly ‘found’ at the base of the North Tower, having survived the fireball without even being singed.A few blocks from ‘ground zero’, Fox News interviewed a man who claimed to have seen the collapse of the towers. This was what he said:“. . . . . came out of nowhere and just [inaudible] right into the side of the twin tower, exploding through the other side…and then I witnessed both towers collapse, one first then the second. Mostly due to structural failure because the fire was just too intense.”Whereas everyone else was in deep shock, he ‘witnessed’ rather than ‘saw’ the collapse and moreover, had the presence of mind to suggest the cause of the collapse. Thus the seeds were planted in people whose critical faculties were at their lowest.

8. Reluctance to hold an inquiry. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were the greatest crime in American history, so it would have been expected that the U.S. government would lose no time in setting up an inquiry and not put any financial constraints on it. So the families of the victims became increasingly angry at the absence of any government interest in holding an inquiry. Four of the widows, named by the media as the ‘Jersey Girls’, formed a campaigning group, and one of them, Lorie Van Auken, described the government’s extreme reluctance to hold an inquiry. opposition they experienced.Eventually, after heel-dragging for over a year, the Bush Administration agreed to set up an inquiry. To put this in context, here are the times it took to set up inquiries into previous disasters:

• Titanic sinking 6 day
• Pearl Harbor attack 9 days
• JFK assassination 7 days
• Challenger disaster 7 days
• Events of 9/11 441 days

Except for 9/11, average time just over a week. So why did it take the government over 60 times as long to set up an inquiry into the greatest crime in US history?

Moreover, when the Bush administration did get round to setting up the 9/11 Commission of inquiry, its final budget was $14 million, compared with the following other investigations:

• $40 million for President Bill Clinton’s real estate and sex scandals;
• $50 million for the 2004 Columbia disaster;
• $75 million for the 1986 Challenger disaster.

The initial choice was Henry Kissinger who, as Laurie van Auken put it, was informally known as “the king of cover-ups”. When pressed to reveal if his client list included any of the bin Laden family, he resigned. Indeed, the widespread negative reaction to the initial appointment of Kissinger prompted The New York Times commented in an editorial:

it is tempting to wonder if the choice of Mr Kissinger is not a clever maneuver by the White House to contain an investigation it had long opposed.

9. The 9/11 Commission Report. When the Bush White House got round to setting up The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, informally known as the 9/11 Commission, it appointed Republican Tom Kean and Democrat Lee Hamilton to chair it, with Philip Zelikow as executive director. It was claimed that it was independent and impartial.It was neither of these, as David Ray Griffin makes abundantly clear in his book “The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions”Was it independent?Despite its nominally bipartisan joint Chairmanship, the Commission was anything but independent.Philip Zelikow was, for all intents and purposes, a member of the White House.

He had worked with Condoleezza Rice; both were members of the National Security Commission in the 1980s. In the Clinton years they co-authored a book “To Build a Better World: Choices to End the Cold War and Create a Global Commonwealth” (in view of subsequent geopolitical events, a travesty of what the book purported to be).

As revealed in Philip Shenon’s book “The Commission”, during the 9/11 Commission’s work, Zelikow was in breach of his purported impartiality status by making frequent telephone calls to the White House.

Was it impartial?

One might think that, though not independent, the Commission could, at least in principle, be impartial. But as Griffin makes clear, as executive director, Zelikow decided which matters were worth looking into, and which were not.

It was Zelikow who decided which witnesses would be heard and more importantly, which witness testimony would be included in the report. Of the over 100 omissions or distortions one of the most egregious was the omission of the testimony by the Secretary for Transportation, Norman Mineta. He was responding to an opening question by Commissioner Hamilton about the events in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) and an alleged shoot down order. He described a conversation between Cheney and a young man:

Mineta: “During the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President…the plane is 50 miles out…the plane is 30 miles out….and when it got down to the plane is 10 miles out, the young man also said to the vice president “do the orders still stand?”

And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said

“Of course the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary?”

Given that no planes are allowed anywhere near the Pentagon, arguably the most heavily defended building in the world, it was inconceivable that any plane that approached it would not be shot down, so the ‘orders that stood’ must have been not to shoot it down.

Whatever the interpretation, the final 9/11 Commission Report made no mention of Mineta’s testimony.

These, and a great many other instances, led Griffin to conclude that essentially, “the White House was investigating itself”.

Presidential non-testimony

In view of the Bush Admistration’s previously deep reluctance to hold an inquiry into the greatest crime in American history, the circumstances of his testimony to a panel of 9/11 Commission members may raised eyebrows. As reported on April 28, 2004 in The New York Times:

• Bush did not testify alone, but with Vice President Cheney.
• Neither testified under oath.Neither a recording nor a transcript of the meeting was made.

10. Media treatment of evidence. The attacks on World Trade Center began at 1.46pm UK time, but by the following morning, within hours of the attacks, the UK Times had produced a detailed “24-page Terror Report”. The attacks had reportedly come ‘out of the blue’, but Page 5 had the headline “Bin Laden heads list of suspects”.In contrast to the state of stunned horror of the American people, prominent Israeli politicians were already thinking about its strategic significance:- Within an hour or so of the attacks, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was Interviewed by the BBC in London. Seconds into the interview, Barak mentioned ‘the Bin Laden organisation’. Though not directly accusing Bin Laden, the seed had been planted during a time of national trauma, when critical faculties were at their lowest. And two hours only after the pulverization of the North Tower Paul Bremer, chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism, appeared on NBC to name bin Laden as prime suspect.

On September 12, The New York Times reported that asked what the attacks meant for Israel, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu replied, ”It’s very good.” Then he edited himself: ”Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” He predicted that the attack would ”strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”

Even on the day it had happened, as Americans looked on in horror, Netanyahu was clearly not thinking about sympathy for the victims, but thinking about its strategic significance, and in particular, how it could be used to get America to do more for Israel.

It’s worth noting, in parenthesis, that on Nov 21, 2001, in an article “Up in Smoke” in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz mentioned that “Every Sunday afternoon, New York time, Netanyahu would call Silverstein. It made no difference what the subject was or where Netanyahu was, he would always call, Silverstein told an Israeli acquaintance.”

The attacks were reported to have come ‘out of the blue’, yet as early as September 14 the FBI announced the names of all 19 hijackers, all of them ‘fanatical Muslims’. Such extraordinary detective work by the FBI should surely have raised a few eyebrows in the days and weeks after 9/11, as people began to emerge from their trauma.

Yet on June 5, 2006, FBI spokesman Rex Tomb said, “The FBI has no hard evidence connecting Usama Bin Laden to FBI says, it has “No hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11”.

In selecting the above evidence I have concentrated on television and video footage, because the evidence of one’s own eyes it is so much more difficult to deny. I have not covered the failure to deal the hijacked planes and the war games, or the attack on the Pentagon. These are covered in detail by James Corbett in his video ‘War games’, and anyone wanting an analysis of all aspects of 9/11, Massimo Mazzucco’s long and detailed documentary ‘September 11 -The New Pearl Harbor’ fits the bill admirably.

Of the numerous books dealing with it, the best known is The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin, plus his nine others. Perhaps the most cost-effective in terms of size is Griffin’s essay ‘The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True’.

* * *

Why do so many people continue to accept the official 9/11 narrative?

One is bound to wonder if there’s a psychological explanation for people’s willingness to accept the word of officialdom, no matter how ludicrous. Part of the explanation may be that people feel a need to conform to what they perceive to be the majority view.

Experiments by psychologist Solomon Asch in 1951 were very revealing and to many, disturbing. Asch was interested to see if humans were prepared to modify their opinions in order conform to those of a group.

Groups of eight male college students took part the experiment. In each group, only one of the eight was the subject of the experiment; the others were actors whose role was to reveal how the participant would modify his behaviour in response to the actors’ behaviour. The students were shown a card with a line on it, followed by another card with three lines labeled 1, 2 and 3. One of these was the same length as the one on the other card; the others were clearly longer or shorter. All the actors were instructed to select one of the lines that differed from the test line. The real participant was always seated so he would be the last to respond.

There were 18 trials. On the first two, both subjects and actors gave the obvious and correct answer. It was the result of 12 trials that the experimenter was interested in.
A third of the subjects gave the same wrong answers as the actors at least half the time, and only one-fourth resisted pressure to conform to wrong answers. gave correct answers in defiance of the pressure to conform to the wrong answers provided by the group.

The Asch experiment has been repeated many times, with similar results. As primates, we are intensely social. We are very much aware of what those around us think; we want to be liked and ‘in’ with the group.

This need to conform has always been exploited in the use of government propaganda. The ‘team of five million’ is but one of many examples of the clever use of behavioural psychology by Jacinda Ardern and her government. So it’s easy to understand why so many people who question the official Covid-19 narrative are reluctant to be labeled as ‘conspiracy theorists’.

Cognitive dissonance

Over and above social pressure, there’s another, more powerful factor at work – cognitive dissonance. After 9-11 psychiatrists reported a massive increase in anxiety and depression. In the 2010 YouTube video ‘Psychologists help 911 truth deniers accept the facts’ a number of clinical psychologists were interviewed on the way people react to 9-11. Here’s what three of them had to say about the underlying psychology:

Frances Shure, M.A. “I’m Fran Shure, and I have a Masters Degree in from the University of Colorado. I’ve had a private practice as a psychotherapist and as a licenced professional counsellor for about twenty years. Why do people resist this information, the information that shows that the official story about 911 cannot be true? What I’ve learned is that, as humans, each of us has a world view, and that world view is formed in great part by the culture we grow up in. When we hear information that contradicts our world view, social psychologists call that resulting insecurity ‘cognitive dissonance’. For example, with 911, we have one cognition, which is the official story, what our government told us, what our media repeated to us over and over, that 19 Muslims attacked us. On the other hand, we have what scientists, researchers, architects, engineers, are now beginning to tell us, which is, that there is evidence which shows that the official story cannot be true. So now, we’ve lost our sense of security. We are starting to feel vulnerable. Now we’re confused.
What some of us will tend to do is deny the evidence that’s coming our way, and stick to the original story, the official story, and to try to regain our equilibrium in that way. Another thing we can do is decide to look at the conflicting evidence and be sincere and be open-minded and look at both sides of the issue, and then make up one’s own mind about what reality is.”

Robert Hopper, PhD, Licenced clinical psychologist. “911 Truth challenges our most fundamental beliefs about our government and our country. When your beliefs are challenged, or when two beliefs are inconsistent, cognitive dissonance is created. 911 Truth challenges the beliefs that our country protects us and keeps us safe, and that America is the good guy.

“My name is Bob Hopper and I have a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Cincinatti. For the last 29 years I’ve been a licenced PhD clinical psychologist in Boulder, Colorado. When your beliefs are challenged, fear and anxiety are created. In response to that, our psychological defences kick in, and they protect us from these emotions. Denial, which is probably the most primitive psychological defence, is the one most likely to kick in when our beliefs are challenged.”

Dorothy Lorig, M.A., counselling psychologist. “I’m Dorothy Lorig. I have a Masters degree in counselling psychology from the University of Colorado, and I’ve been practising re-evaluation counselling for over 16 years. If we think of our world view as being our mental and emotional ‘home’, I think all of us will do just about anything to defend our homes, to defend our families, and so I see that with people, and I saw that with myself when my brother tried to talk about it. “Don’t mess with me, don’t mess with my home, don’t mess with my comfort with how things are.” And about a week later, I read a lengthy article by Professor Griffin about why he believes the official account of 911 cannot be true. And it was a very well researched article and I was in my office at the time, I sat there and I felt my stomach churning. I thought maybe I was going to be sick. And I leaped out of my chair and ran out the door and took a long walk round the block, and just broke down. I understand now that what was happening was my world view about my government being in some way my protector, almost like a parent, had been dashed, and it was like being cast out into the wilderness. It was the closest way to describe that feeling, and I sobbed and I sobbed, and felt the ground had completely disappeared beneath my feet, and I knew, at some point in the walk, that I was going to have to become active in educating other people about this, that for me to retain any sense of integrity, I was going to take some action. I couldn’t let something like this go.”

One thing is clear from all this; people find great difficulty in truly objective thinking, i.e. distinguishing between thoughts and emotions. This is particularly true for Americans and 911; to ask people to accept that their government has committed mass murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens means asking them to abandon their most fundamental view of reality.

Confronting the reality of 9/11 necessitates a fundamental reassessment of reality. It can be thought of as a preparation for the even greater reconstruction required by the implications of the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’.

For many, 9/11 is a kind of gateway to Covid.