Too Much Monkey Business

Say one more stupid thing to me
before the final nail is driven in - Bob Dylan

In celebration of Hugo Chavez belling the devil in his own sanctuary, I watched again Venezuela Bolivariana: People and the Struggle of the 4th World War. If you haven't seen it, or if you've only seen it once, check it out. It does a wonderful job of setting Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution in the context of Latin America's decades' old appetitite for a scrape with the forces of globalism. There's a wealth of wisdom and inspiration here, in the words of humble people feeling their power for the first time. ("President Bush," says one, "if you want to invade our country, you'll find a people who has a constitution in their hands. And we'll shoot you with a constitution!") This time, it's the words of activist and street performer Roberto Borges that stuck with me. Speaking of the opposition, he says "It's not only the weapon that fires. It's the weapon that seeks to make us idiots, which is the media."

Very briefly, three current examples of how that weapon is deployed against us.

Story: US threatened to bomb Pakistan after 9/11, in which Pervez Musharraf tells 60 Minutes that "the intelligence director told me that [Richard Armitage] said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.'" This shouldn't even be a story, as Armitage's threat was reported as early as September 12, 2001 in Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Furthermore, it's only a second-hand account. What is worth reporting is whose hand it was. This unnamed intelligence director was none other than Mahmood Ahmed, Pakistan's 9/11 paymaster, who famously authorized ISI-al Qaeda double agent Omar Saeed Sheikh to wire $100,000 to Mohammed Atta just weeks before the attack. I say "famously," though it is only to us, because it's one of a multitude of facts that create an alternate map of the world that seems to convey a true landscape, but that is so unlike the one which most people have been dulled into accepting they inhabit.

Ahmed, of course, was already in Washington for his high-level meetings on "terrorism," so Armitage didn't have far to travel.

Story: Gosch Photos Tipster Sought, in which West Des Moines police announce they "want to know who sent them a letter telling them the photos delivered to Johnny Gosch's mother were fakes." According to the tipster, the photo of the three bound boys originated in Tampa, and harmlessly depicted kids "challenging each other to an escape contest," but Florida investigator Nelson Zalva has produced nothing to support that flimsy reed.

As I said last week, the most suspicious aspect of the story is the identity and the motivation of the anonymous tipster, who was both closely monitoring the Gosch story and able to direct authorities to a Florida state official who said he knew the pictures were harmless, but couldn't prove it.

Incredibly, predictably, that lead was enough for police to release a statement to the press that the photos could be fake, which much of the press spun as statement of fact. As far as the media were concerned, the photos were debunked before they were properly investigated, and so it looked, for those who sought a reason not to look any further, that it was just more of crazy old Noreen and her conspiracy theories. Noreen, by the way, posted on Thursday that she has now received a death threat. "I must be getting very close to the final answer for someone to take this step," she writes. Zalva, she told 4acloserlook.com, is thought to be close to Jeb Bush.

Story: Skeptic Magazine debunks 9/11 conspiracy theories, in which Phil Molé expends 7,154 words affirming the gullible assumptions of those who wear the false crown of skepticism.

159 words are devoted to the few millions of "put options," ignoring the billions worth in insider trading (including one $5 billion transaction); the sudden resignation on Sept 12, 2001, "effective immediately" and without reason given, of Mayo Shattuck III, head of the Alex Brown unit of Deutsche Bank, which was the principal institution involved in the trades; and the more than $100 million in suspicious transactions on WTC computers during the attacks, and the subsequent supression of their data recovery.

247 words are taken to debunk the "FEMA arrived early" story, ignoring Giuliani's unpublished testimony before the 9/11 commission which confirmed that hundreds of FEMA employees were already on site with equipment for a scheduled bioweapons drill.

334 words are used to say that Flight 93 didn't land at Cleveland. It didn't.

351 words are spent on "stand down," when it's properly understood as a failure to "stand up," since on June 1 2001 discretion to shoot down was taken away from field command and entrusted solely to the Secretary of Defense. An order rescinded shortly after the attacks. The article mentions none of this.

535 words are given to a history lesson in Middle East terror, ignoring the role of the CIA and its regional proxies in funding and training and "stirring up" Muslim extremists.

816 words are spent on the fallacious Pentagon missile strike theory.

1,117 words are devoted to the shallow psychobabble that conspiracy theories are "comforting."

And 3,595 words - half of the total - are spent on demolition theory, attention to which, I've repeatedly said, is a waste of our energies.

But undoubtedly it's mission accomplished for Phil Molé, and Skeptic readers can pride themselves again on their steadfast conventional wisdom. Neither are likely to read Daniel Hopsicker's September 15 report on Wolfgang Bohringer, one of Atta's German "brothers" during his mobbed-up Florida days. They'll never have heard of Bohringer, wouldn't accept as a source something called "Mad Cow Morning News" ("Oh, pleeeease," I can hear their syrupy cry), and so they will never really know Atta.

The weapon has made them idiots. I suggest we follow Boots Riley's advice, and pick a bigger weapon.