Paul Craig Roberts: Can Anything Be Done?

[Micahyah]

Can Anything Be Done?
By Paul Craig Roberts
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article14718.htm


08/27/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Many readers have praised me for my courage in broaching taboo subjects and stating obvious truths. Others denounce me for “being unpatriotic and distrusting our government.” One reader, Susan Hartman, wrote to me that I was obviously in the pay of Islamic Jihadists and that she had reported me to the FBI.

Despite the lack of evidence to support their belief, a number of readers remain confident that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that America narrowly missed being annihilated. These readers know for a fact that Hussein had WMD, because “the President would know, and he wouldn’t lie.”

In other words, whatever Bush says is true, and all who doubt him are unpatriotic. “You are with us or against us.” The facts be damned. There are a large number of Susan Hartmans in the body politic.

A group of scientists, engineers, and university professors are trying to start a debate about the collapse of the three World Trade Center buildings. I reported one of their findings: There is an inconsistency between the speed with which the buildings collapsed and the “pancaking theory” used to explain the collapse. Another way of putting the problem is that there seems to be a massive energy deficit in the explanation that the buildings fell as a result of gravitational energy. There simply was not sufficient gravitational energy to produce the results.

For reporting a scientific finding, I was called a “conspiracy theorist.” Only in America is scientific analysis seen as conspiracy theory and government lies as truth.

Applications of the laws of physics and scientific calculations can be reviewed and checked by other scientists. Scientists, like the rest of us, can make mistakes. However, questions raised about the collapse of the WTC buildings are not engaged but ignored.

The 9/11 scholars findings seem to be in sync with public opinion. Polls show that more than one-third and as much as one-half of the American public does not believe the government’s 9/11 story.

The public doesn’t believe the John F. Kennedy assassination story either. Nevertheless, experts who point out problems in the official story are still called “conspiracy theorists” even though a large percentage of the people share their doubts.

I think the reason so many Americans do not believe the Kennedy story told by the Warren Commission and the 9/11 story told by the 9/11 Commission is not because Americans are knowledgeable about ballistics or physics, or know how to do energy calculations, but because the stories contain too many unusual happenings, too many oddities.

In the Kennedy case doubts are raised by such things as an improbable bullet trajectory, the against-all-procedures absence of Secret Service agents from the rear and sides of Kennedy’s limo, the inexplicable access of an unauthorized armed civilian, Jack Ruby, who was able to assassinate Oswald inside the jail before Oswald could be questioned. Online at http://www.insidebayarea.com/timesst...ews/ci_4213295 there is a report that two scientists, Pat Grant and Erik Randich, at the Forensic Science Center of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory have discredited the reliability of the “neutron activation” analysis, which was used to “prove” that all the recovered bullet fragments came from Oswald’s shots. Courts no longer accept as evidence and the FBI no longer uses the analysis that was used to close the Oswald case.

Any one of these things would be an oddity. The combination of oddities becomes inexplicable, a statistical impossibility.

The same with the explanation of 9/11. Powerfully constructed buildings collapse when there is no source of the required energy to do the job. A large 757 hits the Pentagon but leaves a small hole, and there is no sign of wings, engines, tail or fuselage. Every air control and military procedure fails, and hijacked airliners are not intercepted by jet fighters. The alleged hijackers’ names apparently are not on the passenger lists, and some of the alleged hijackers have been found alive and well in Saudi Arabia. Dr. Thomas R. Olmstead used the Freedom of Information Act to get a copy of the autopsy list of American Airlines flight 77, and he reports that there are no Arabic names on the list.

My point is a simple one. Attentive people, even if they are not scientifically literate, can sense when there are too many oddities for an explanation to be believable.

If deception is sensed, there is a receptive audience when experts or film makers speak. Denouncing inconvenient facts as “conspiracy theories” is a way of suppressing debate and investigation.

This itself is telling. If the official explanations are safe, their proponents should welcome the opportunity to show again and again that the explanations can stand all challenges. Instead, the second a challenge shows its head, it is branded a “conspiracy theory.” That tells me that the official explanations can stand no challenge.

Don’t ask me who killed Kennedy and why, and don’t ask me who was behind the 9/11 attack or what brought the three WTC buildings down. My position is a simple one. The official accounts are too improbable to be believable.

I won’t believe them until the government can explain where the energy came from to bring down the three WTC buildings. With the demise of the “single bullet” theory, there seems to be no verification of Oswald’s magical shooting.

It seems to me that the real conspiracy theories are the explanations that are overweighted with improbabilities.

Readers ask me what can we do? We can do very little as we have lost control over our government. Elections, even if not stolen, change very little. Government got free of our control when we forgot the teaching of our Founding Fathers that government is always the greatest threat to our liberty.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

[Nasik]

Excellent thread, thanks. I have read a few of Mr. Roberts' articles, and have found them informative and enlightening.

[Justice]

It’s a good post and obviously people are becoming sceptical of our so called leaders because they have become so corrupt that using the law, no one can bring them into question as they create the law and control how it is applied.

Things are on the change and this weekend in a news clip about restoring normal diplomatic relations with Cuba it showed and lot of people demonstrating about something or another but in the clip it also flashed across a banner that said something like “International arrest warrant” at the top and then in the middle it said something about 9/11.

I didn’t get the chance to read it all but make no mistake things like that don’t appear by accident as all the mass media is controlled and it also shows that Cubans may be more free than we are.

[Micahyah]

9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out
Edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott
Olive Branch Press (Interlink Books)

"The Most Important Book of Our Time" - Paul Craig Roberts


Truth activists can celebrate Thanksgiving astonishingly early this year given the precocious wealth of resources now hitting theaters and book shops across the land. Each new work seems to open another frontier and spread truth to a fresh audience. The relentless Dr. Griffin deserves great credit for many of these sallies, and now he has teamed with eminent diplomat/scholar Dr. Peter Dale Scott to catalyze and edit this latest tour de force. This anthology addresses the crimes of 9/11 from a rare altitude of intelligence in ten authoritative voices, and examines their premeditation and abuse as an empire ordaining event. Whenever you encounter 9/11 truth resistance in bright but wingnut-traumatized friends, this book is the antidote to offer. - Ed.

Pre-pub Review
"This is the most important book of our time. Distinguished national and international scientists and scholars present massive evidence that The 9/11 Commission Report is a hoax and that the 9/11 "terrorist attack" has been manipulated to serve a hegemonic agenda in the Middle East. The book's call for a truly independent panel of experts to be empowered to bring out the true facts must be heeded or Americans will never again live under accountable government." — Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury during the Reagan administration

CONTENTS
1. 9/11, the American Empire, and Common Moral Norms
David Ray Griffin

2. Assessing the Official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory
Karen Kwiatkowski

3. Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?
Steven E. Jones

4. Propping Up the War on Terror: Lies about the WTC by NIST and Underwriters Laboratories
Kevin Ryan

5. The Background of 9/11: Drugs, Oil, and US Covert Operations
Peter Dale Scott

6. What We Have Learned about the "Strategy of Tension": Historical Data from the Cold War Period
Daniele Ganser

7. 9/11, Texas A&M University, and Heresy
Morgan Reynolds

8. Global Ambitions and Geopolitical Wars: The Domestic Challenge
Richard Falk

9. 9/11 and the 9/11 Wars: Understanding the Supreme Crimes
John McMurtry

9. The War on Terror and Pax Americana
Ola Tunander

10. Parameters of Power in the Global Dominance Group: 9/11 and Election Irregularities in Context
Peter Phillips with Bridget Thornton and Celeste Vogler

"It has long been clear that the Bush-Cheney administration cynically exploited the attacks of 9/11 to promote its imperial designs. But the present volume confronts us with evidence for an even more disturbing conclusion: that the 9/11 attacks were themselves orchestrated by this administration precisely so they could be thus exploited. If this is true, it is not merely the case, as the Downing Street memos show, that the stated reason for attacking Iraq was a lie. It is also the case that the whole "war on terror" was based on a prior deception. This book hence confronts the American people---indeed the people of the world as a whole---with an issue second to none in importance and urgency. I give this book, which in no way can be dismissed as the ravings of 'paranoid conspiracy theorists,' my highest possible recommendation."---Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and founder of VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity)

"Read this. Read this now. And then tell someone else what it told you. If you wondered where morality, intellectual rigor, common sense and historical perspective went when they disappeared from public discourse, be reassured—the authors of these essays were keeping them safe for you, along with a surprisingly functional sense of humor. This is a massively important book about events that are still changing our world. Forget the internet wingnuts, forget the blurry thinking and the blurry photographs, forget the government gibberish. If you want to know about 9/11, read this book. Read it. Read it now. And then tell someone else what it told you."-—A. L. Kennedy, author of Paradise and Indelible Acts

"Official versions of historical events should always be questioned. This book, dealing with 9/11 and much more, does just that, and from various points of view. It will provoke argument and that's a good thing."-—Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

"In 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott point out that the book's publication "signals the beginning of a new phase of the 9/11 Truth Movement, one in which scholars will play an increasingly larger role." Griffin and Scott have assembled academics, scientists, and other intellectuals with fine minds and courageous hearts to deliver the bitter pill: the official explanation of the events of 9/11 is false and the evidence indicating an inside job is significant. In doing so, they have returned scholarship to its rightful place of leading us back to excellence."-—Catherine Austin Fitts, Assistant Secretary of Housing, George H. W. Bush administration

"For far too long, the very reasonable questions raised by 9/11 have been ignored and even ridiculed by America's press and politicians, who treat the subject with the sort of willful blindness that suggests a wish not to find out unpleasant truths. We, the people, therefore owe the editors of this important new collection our warm thanks for their intelligent and unrelenting work."---Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Culture and Communications, New York University, and author of Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order and Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)

"All Americans who love their country enough to dig into the facts of these critical times will be well rewarded by examining David Griffin's books. 9/11 truth is a very important issue—-with the power to bring lasting change to our country."-—The Reverend William Sloane Coffin Jr., former pastor, Riverside Church, New York, and author of The Passion for the Possible: A Message to U.S. Churches