Noam Chomsky has been much worse than hypocritical in the role he has chosen for himself in the study of 9/11. Chomsky treats the subject of 9/11 as if he’s some sort of master of analysis on the subject of what happened. He presents his conclusions without showing the due diligence of going through the relevant primary and secondary sources in a balanced and scholarly fashion. The primary sources Chomsky chooses to disregard include passenger lists, video and photographic evidence in the public domain, eyewitness accounts, original news coverage on the day of 9/11 and the like.
It seems that Noam Chomsky was well aware of Kevin Barrett’s case. Without naming either Barrett or the University of Wisconsin, Chomsky alludes to the matter in a video of an interview posted in 2011 on the You Tube channel of RPShredow. The item is entitled “Noam Chomsky Discusses 9/11 Conspiracy Theories.” The interviewer is Michael Albert. Chomsky’s comments begin with his observation that somewhere between a third and a half of all Americans ascribe to some version of the interpretations brought forward by the 9/11 Truth Movement. Chomsky then tries to alter a perceptual trend that he clearly does not like.
This very revealing and important video captures a low point in Professor Chomsky’s career. The manager of the You Tube channel on which the item appears has removed the comments section reporting that the eliminated responses were mostly from “the dumbest, annoyingest fucktards ever.” The unspoken message of this exorcism of dissenting voices is that it is acceptable to obliterate the remarks of those that dare criticize Chomsky’s position on 9/11.
The evidence of the specific nature of the detractors’ disagreements with Chomsky is eliminated, presumably by someone close to Chomsky, possibly even the unnamed interviewer himself. Much like those that throw up the “conspiracy theorist” label to evade the give-and-take of constructive dialogue, the self-appointed thought police in this case replace a critical exchange of ideas with a smear job calculated to demean and create hatred towards an identifiable group.
In the body of the video Chomsky exudes a remarkably aggressive outpouring of slander and vituperation against the broad array of individuals that have genuinely investigated the lies and crimes of 9/11. As part of this diatribe Chomsky refers to “some guy, who instead of teaching his courses taught about this stuff [9/11] and therefore wasn’t rehired, which is normal.” Chomsky’s prior knowledge of the details of the case to which he refers is well evidenced in a published E-Mail exchange he conducted with Dr. Barrett in 2008.
After introducing the Barrett case, a matter of which Chomsky knows much more than he lets on, the MIT professor then flips backwards in more ways than one. He reminisces that he himself “once taught courses on this kind of stuff but in my spare time.” Chomsky gives no explanation of the obvious contradiction between his blanket condemnations of those that study 9/11 and his recollection that he used to teach classes on similar subjects.
What courses did Chomsky teach in his spare time? What subjects did he decide to relegate to spare time studies? What is Chomsky’s rationale for decreeing that skeptical perspectives on the official narrative of 9/11 do not belong in the curriculum of courses other than those he would assign to spare time studies? Chomsky concludes this important segment on 9/11 and the role of universities by indicating that he himself would have been fired too had he acted like the unnamed “guy” he’s accusing. “You have some duties at the University,” implying Kevin Barrett did not perform them.
Chomsky badly misrepresents the Barrett case by indicating the university instructor in question— “some guy”— abandoned his responsibilities to teach the full curriculum. He accuses Barrett of devoting all his pedagogical energy to the sole subject of 9/11. As demonstrated by the outcome U of W’s internal investigation of this controversy, nothing of the sort happened. Dr. Barrett was found to be conscientious in integrating various perspectives on 9/11 into a much larger multi-faceted survey of Islam, both historically and in contemporary times. The senior academic thus smears the more junior academic, disregarding altogether the best documentary evidence of what happened in the classroom during the teaching of the course in question, namely Dr. Barrett’s offering of Islam: Religion and Culture.
By commenting as he did on a significant precedent-setting case, Dr. Chomsky aligns himself with those that intervened politically to cut short Dr. Barrett’s promising academic career. By acting as an opponent of the principle that the events of 9/11 present a vital subject for legitimate academic research and debate in our universities, Dr. Chomsky demonstrated he is no friend of academic freedom. He does not support the underlying principles that provided him with his own position of academic security from which to develop his oft contested ideas and theories.
The video’s content helps to reaffirm the significance of Barrie Zwicker’s seminal assessment of “Noam Chomsky’s Shame” in Towers of Deception in 2006. Moreover, it helps substantiate many of the allegations made by Kevin Barrett in his Left Forum presentation, “Why Chomsky Is Wrong on 9/11.” Chomsky’s frontal attack on the 9/11 Truth Movement should bring to the surface longstanding questions about the underlying motivations of America’s most highly publicized university professor.
Not one aspect of the officially authorized account of 9/11 has been able to withstand the test of close scrutiny by the best of the citizen investigators in the 9/11 Truth Movement. The crude vacuity of the ongoing 9/11 cover up can be seen as powerful evidence that many of our governors have much to hide about their own roles in the lies and crimes of 9/11 and in the subsequent onslaughts of state terror to which the original misrepresentations gave rise.
The persecution of Kevin Barrett in 2006 for doing his job as a conscientious Islamic Studies teacher can be seen in retrospect as telling evidence of government and media collusion in the 9/11 crime. The unfolding of this dark episode involving a devastating betrayal of academic integrity in the Wisconsin heartland of America helps expose those who have the most to lose if the real culprits of 9/11 were to be identified.
Eventually the University of Wisconsin caved in to the pressure from the enemies of academic freedom. Because Dr. Barrett lost his job, the University of Wisconsin lost much respect among those that genuinely seek to safeguard the fragile institutional foundations on which free and democratic societies depend. Academic institutions where the protections of academic tenure are genuinely earned, honored and defended, frequently form a last line for the defense of truth.
The fragile rules and procedures essential to the exercise of academic freedom are meant to form primary mechanisms in the age-old quest to distinguish what is real from what is false. What is the purpose of universities once they abandon their higher mission as identifiers, custodians and protectors of truth? Are universities worthy of respect once they become mere agencies for the advancement of the political agendas of dominant interests?
In the paradigmatic case instigated by the truth telling of Dr. Kevin Barrett, a major American university found itself in the maelstrom of controversy over how 9/11 should be interpreted. Rather than signal its capacity to host such a vital and necessary task of drawing truth from a refereed reading of both real or connived “facts,” the University of Wisconsin embraced the rule of politics over the rule of academic integrity. When put to the test, the U of W’s administration as well as its Faculty Association failed to defend the crucial capacity of qualified faculty to express themselves freely on subjects of great political sensitivity.
Rather than leave the realm of intellectual controversy, Dr. Barrett became a pioneer in alternative Internet broadcasting, the main site of his Truth jihad. For many years Dr. Barrett has covered on his Truth jihad media network every twist and turn in the gradual coming to light of the truth of 9/11 and many related issues, episodes and personalities connected to the Mother of All False Flag Events. Dr. Barrett has sought out and interviewed thousands of significant news-makers whose importance might otherwise have been kept hidden. He has lectured widely including at universities in Turkey, Morocco and Iran on a wide array of subjects encompassed within his many fields of academic and journalistic expertise.
In this fashion Dr. Barrett has helped to expose the huge truth deficit of mainstream media (MSM) venues. By and large these venues and their agents of deception and distraction have abandoned any pretenses of doing investigative reporting worthy of the name. Rather than speaking truth to power they most often become servants of power acting primarily as obedient stenographers for officialdom.
By going where the MSM won’t go, Dr. Barrett has helped clarify the extent of the dishonesty and obfuscation of a thoroughly corrupted communications industry that includes public broadcasters such as the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. More often than not these agencies of mass communications subordinate the public interest and the common good to the war agendas of the military-industrial complex.
In the decade since Dr. Barrett was purged from the academy, he has created a record of great importance exposing on a day-by-day basis significant breaking news. The books, articles and digital archives of his extensive media work have already become major primary sources concerning many strategic developments in our rapidly changing world. Dr. Barrett’s prolific contributions to the record of our life and times during an era set in motion by the fraudulent interpretation of 9/11 are destined to outlive the mortal existences of the generation that came of age in the 1970s and 80s.
Dr. Barrett’s prodigious journalistic output is often leavened by satire containing copious quantities of parody, paradox and biting irony. Barrett has also continued to publish academic works including two recent edited volumes assessing the distance between media hype and reality in the two violent episodes in Paris in 2015. As on 9/11, both Paris events were instantly characterized without objective investigation as the demented deeds of self-directed Islamic extremists acting independently. I authored articles in both these volumes as part of my collaboration with a persecuted Muslim colleague.
Kevin Barrett continues to bring to the New Media of the Internet a cornucopia of topics that should be freely and openly debated in our universities but, by and large, are not. Our institutions of higher learning are thereby failing some of the core principles that university faculty members, including Prof. Chomsky and I, are charged to serve and defend.
As I see it this article forms a part of my best effort to rise to the high responsibility invested in tenured professors to safeguard the academic integrity of universities.
In my view Dr. Chomsky has fallen far short of the ideals he espoused in 1967 when he called for “intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.” In his early days Professor Chomsky was himself the target of attacks on his democratic right and academic responsibility to articulate truths often inconvenient to power. How did he survive those professional and political attacks? Certainly part of the answer lies in Chomsky’s own erudition, eloquence, tenacity, and a prodigious level of research and publication during his most robust years.
Kevin Barrett, however, has displayed similar qualities working intelligently and tirelessly against the many obstructions put up by an elaborate machinery that might be characterized as the 9/11 Cover Up Industry. The 9/11 Cover Up Industry can be seen as part of a large propaganda-military-industrial complex whose elements also include what Norman Finkelstein labeled The Holocaust Industry and what David Miller and others have described as the Islamophobia Industry.
In spite of all that has been thrown against him, Dr. Barrett has for the last decade worked with courage and great internal resolve to expose the workings of false flag terrorism, including the events of 9/11. He has done so without the safety, security and access to resources that are supposed to come with academic appointments. It is not a big stretch to speculate that there are some hidden factors at play in the disparity of treatment afforded Chomsky and Barrett by universities. Advertising themselves as institutions of higher learning, these institutions are unfortunately sometimes not the paragons of peer review and meritocracy they are supposed to be.
A recent example of the propensity of some universities to abandon the high ground of protected academic freedom lies in the contested efforts of Florida Atlantic University to fire the tenured Communications Professor James Tracy. Tracy is facing severe professional recriminations for exposing many of the frauds permeating the Sandy Hook false flag school shooting event in Connecticut in 2012.
One of the consequences of evading any formal procedures to deal with the lies and crimes of 9/11 is the frequency of successor events to keep the fear of Islamic terrorism alive. Dr. Barrett has applied his expertise in false flag terrorism to immediate assessments of the engineered violence brought by the 9/11 culprits to London, Madrid, Bali, Ottawa, Sydney, San Bernadino, Brussels, Orlando, and Dhaka. In The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, Trevor Aaronson has demonstrated the domestic side of this transnational genre of psychological operation.
You will read “Noam Chomsky, Kevin Barrett and Academic Freedom” in the next part.
Understanding of the nature of the lies and crimes of 9/11 has moved quite far in the decade between the publication of Barrie Zwicker’s Towers of Deception in 2006 and Kevin Barrett’s 2016 presentation at the Left Forum. Where Zwicker emphasized Chomsky’s connection to the US deep state, Kevin Barrett views Chomsky as a Zionist with deep attachments to Israel where he lived and worked on a kibbutz in the early 1950s.
Chomsky’s relationship with Israel is outlined in flattering terms in a fluff piece in a publication entitled Tablet, a heavily pro-Zionist venue featuring other interviews with the likes of Elliot Abrams. Abrams was an influential member of the Project for the New American Century, the neocon lobby group that in 2000 notoriously signaled the forthcoming 9/11 strikes by calling for “something like a new Pearl Harbor.”
In the Tablet interview, Noam Chomsky explained the attachments and preoccupations of his Jewish orthodox parents. In his seminal years, Hebrew was the main language of the Chomsky family, a linguistic asset that the younger Chomsky would later call upon in his career as a student of linguistics.
Noam Chomsky’s father pointed his son towards the writings of Jewish philosopher Ahad Ha’am. Chomsky looked back fondly on his father’s account of Ha’am’s advocacy of “a Zionist revival in Israel, in Palestine.” The aim of this revival would be to create “a cultural center for the Jewish people.” Chomsky elaborates, explaining Ha’am’s view that “Jews as primarily a Diaspora community needed a cultural center that has a physical presence. Ha’am was said to be very sympathetic to the Palestinians.” Ha’am wanted kindly treatment of the Palestinians but he left no doubt that they should move aside to make room for what Chomsky refers to again and again as a “Jewish cultural center.”
In the Tablet article Chomsky’s orientation towards Israel is publicly portrayed as that of a loyalist calling for a kinder gentler form of Zionism. As Kevin Barrett sees it, however, Chomsky’s willingness to criticize the Israeli state, but especially its abuses and assaults directed at the Palestinian people, should not be allowed to take away from understanding that he is a committed Zionist intent on protecting and advancing Israel’s interests.
Chomsky’s position on 9/11 has been replicated throughout much of the Left where well-funded gatekeeping, sponsored by the likes of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, is indeed rife. There is a conspicuous absence of leading Jewish intellectuals that have publicly attempted to decipher what actually transpired in New York, Washington and the air lanes of the northeastern United States during the transformative day of September 11, 2001. Consider, for instance, the relationship of Miko Peled, Medea Benjamin, Michael Albert, David Corn, Amy Goodman, George Monbiot, Cy Gonick, Judy Rebick to the enterprise of exposing the lies and crimes of 9/11. Their evasiveness or outright hostility to the 9/11 skeptics is shared by many non-Jewish public intellectuals including Chris Hedges, John Pilger, and Tariq Ali.
Some, but especially Chomsky, have gone beyond maintaining a strategic silence to incite smear campaigns against those that have displayed skepticism towards the official narrative of 9/11. Chomsky sets the bar low in portraying the demeaned “truthers” as an undifferentiated collection of stupid, backward and decrepit souls. “Their lives are no good… Their lives are collapsing… They are people at a loss… Nothing makes any sense… They don’t understand what an explanation is… They think they are experts in physics and civil engineering on the basis of one hour on the Internet.”
These comments reflect the shockingly low level of Chomsky’s near hysterical effort to divert attention away from evidence of what really transpired on 9/11. This type of personalized attack, as if the 9/11 Truth Movement is collectively guilty of some sort of horrific thought crime, replicates on ideological grounds some of the worst attributes of racism and bigotry.
Unfortunately Chomsky’s interventions are fairly representative of the overall quality of many Zionist attacks on the 9/11 Truth Movement. As is especially clear in the writings of Jonathan Kay, for instance, Zionist smear tactics directed at 9/11 “truthers” extend many of the same themes of induced hatred directed at Muslims by the Zionist propagandists in charge of the Islamophobia Industry.
Chomsky’s critical orientation to the actions and power structure of the Israeli government is similar to his critical orientation to the actions and power structure of the United States. Chomsky’s bottom line, however, is his attachment to the Jewish state as the site of a Jewish cultural renaissance that he seeks to advance and protect.
Chomsky refuses to accept that US foreign policy and the foreign policies of the former dependencies of Anglo-American empire have become subordinate to the imperatives of Zionist lobbies as well as to the networks of media, banking and corporate power that serve them. These lobbies figure prominently in the formulation and execution of the Israeli government’s foreign policies. Organizations like the B’nai Brith or Abe Foxman’s thuggish Anti-Defamation League are in reality ideological and political proxy armies. Their role is to silence critics of the Israeli government, to brand as anti-semitic any efforts to identify fundamental disparities in access to power.
All these factors converge to expose Chomsky’s role in serving the dominant clique that emerged from the global coup d’état of September 11, 2001. Chomsky’s power-serving misrepresentations on this subject present an important window into the study of the relationship between 9/11 and the structuring of national and global hierarchies of power. What is the role of universities and the media in the connections linking 9/11 to the Zionist Question, a contemporary extension of what Karl Marx and others used to refer to frequently in European literature as the Jewish Question?
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Sixth part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
In his chapter on “Left Gatekeepers” and the “Shame of Noam Chomsky,” Barrie Zwicker refers to the the “New World Order” as the “diaboligarchy’s” directing agency. Less compelling is Zwicker’s reference to the “New World Order” as the “diaboligarchy’s” directing agency. To me this unfortunate choice of words is much too closely associated with the often crude and chauvinistic populism of Alex Jones and his Infowars media network. Many have come to see Jones’ lucrative media operation as a limited hangout set in place by handlers trying to hold the activities of the 9/11 Truth Movement within manageable constraints.
Due to the important findings over fifteen years of the citizens’ investigation into 9/11, the culprits most deeply implicated in the crime can be identified with much more specificity than an entity vaguely described as a “New World Order.” As Kevin Barrett and many others insist, the time has come to name the names of the probable culprits, Noam Chomsky prominent among them.
While Alex Jones ultimately serves the same masters as Chomsky, the former’s media product is often much closer to the mark of what is really going on than the content of Noam Chomsky’s more magisterial pronouncements. Jones goes at least part of the way into realities of the deep state politics of the twenty-first century. Chomsky, however, sacrificed his capacity to contribute cogently to sensible discourse on contemporary geopolitics by making himself a primary instrument of the most consequential deep state deception of recent times. As a leading agent of disinformation in the psychological trenches of the ongoing Global War of False Flag Terrorism, Chomsky has reduced himself to the level of skeptic pretender Michael Shermer. In the style of Shermer, the elder Chomsky has become an establishment TV professor readily available on Netflix.
“Inside job” is another turn of phrase closely identified with Alex Jones. The term “inside job” effectively conveys in simple language that the originators of the 9/11 crime are not Islamic jihadists acting independently. The idea of an inside job, however, begs the question about how to describe the receptacle containing this phenomenon. Is the ongoing inside job of 9/11 primarily within the box of the US government or is the receptacle larger with multiple compartments? Does this larger receptacle allow for the interpretation emphasized by Kevin Barrett, Christopher Bollyn, Alan Sabrosky and many others that insist that the primary executive oversight of the 9/11 inside job originates primarily with the partisans of Greater Israel?
Long before 9/11, Alex Jones declared himself to be a friend and supporter of the Jewish state of Israel. In declaring his position he condemned the United Nations as Israel’s enemy. Jones’ bias is reflected in his effort to deflect interpretations of the 9/11 crime away from Israel and away from the inner circle of neocon proponents of the Zio-American empire. Webster Tarpley is another early analyst of the 9/11 crimes who has kept to the interpretation outlined in his important book on the subject. As Tarpley sees it, the strikes on the WTC skyscrapers and on the Pentagon were Synthetic Terror: Made in the USA. Many times Tarpley has expressed his opinion that the government of Israel was not a factor in the planning of the most audacious act of “synthetic terror” in US history.
Interestingly, Chomsky’s smear of the 9/11 Truth Movement follows some lines of disinformation similar to those followed by Alex Jones. From their different positions inside and outside the 9/11 Truth Movement, both Jones and Chomsky disseminate dis-info concerning the role of US President George Bush in the 9/11 crime. In reality, Bush seems to have been a marginal figure, at least in the planning phase of the 9/11 operation. Did the core planners of the 9/11 crime send a signal in the title of the storybook being read by the US President to the schoolchildren in Sarasota Florida at the moment of maximum crisis?
Was Bush being labeled the 9/11 scapegoat when he was filmed on the fateful morning reading “My Pet Goat” to the assembled students? Why did Bush continue reading from the book rather than leave the school as news of the two WTC strikes came into Booker Elementary School? Why did the US secret service not whisk the US President away at such a consequential moment of crisis? Why did Bush’s Press Secretary, Ari Fleisher, hold up a sign at the back of the classroom telling the US President in block letters, “DON’T SAY ANYTHING YET”? Why did the US President not return immediately to Washington, as he initially wanted, but instead was taken to Barksdale Air force Base in Louisiana and then to Offut Air force Base in Nebraska?
What transpired to make Dick Cheney rather than George Bush the hands-on Commander In Chief of the US Armed Forces on the morning of 9/11? What was the nature of the alleged credible threat on Air force One and who or what was behind this threat? What should we make of the conflicting testimony of Cheney and Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta concerning Cheney’s activities in the White House Bunker on the morning of 9/11?
Fifteen years of the 9/11 cover up has prevented us from getting clear answers to these any many other basic questions about what really happened on September 11, 2001. In this cover up Chomsky and Jones inhabit different compartments of the same elaborate system of controlled opposition in the United States. Both Jones the truther and Chomsky the anti-truther highlight the role of Bush in their 9/11 commentaries. The effect of this Bush-centric preoccupation points attention away from the main 9/11 suspects including Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barack, Ehud Olmert, Richard Perle, Michael Chertoff, Paul Wolfowitz and other Israel First neocons. Their fingerprints are all over the 9/11 crime.
Chomsky, for instance, tries to highlight Bush in his effort to put a veil over the case of the controlled demolition of WTC 7. Its instant collapse hours after the pulverization of the Twin Towers is often characterized as the “smoking gun” of 9/11. Chomsky seeks to minimize this most damning feature of the 9/11 evidence by putting forward cartoon-like characterizations of 9/11 Truthers. Chomsky mocks us, for instance, with bizarre non-sequiturs like the notion that we think “Bush put the bombs in Building 7.”
You will read “Noam Chomsky and Zionism” in the next part.
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Fifth part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
In his presentation at the Left Forum, Kevin Barrett acknowledged his intellectual debt to the work of Barrie Zwicker, one of Canada’s most accomplished and experienced investigative journalists. Barrett and Zwicker concur that Noam Chomsky’s nonsensical interventions on 9/11 constitute an important part— indeed, perhaps the single most instrumental part— of the 9/11 cover up. If Chomsky’s adoring fans had been treated with respect and truth rather than with duplicity and lies, they might have joined together in a timely and effective way to get to the bottom of the 9/11 deception and to demand some legal and political accountability for the fraud.
The Left’s most influential guru, however, discouraged his obedient flock from trying to sort out 9/11 truth from the instrumentalized fiction embedded in the 9/11 fable. As the Trojan horse within the progressives’ main camps, Chomsky moved decisively and deliberately to discourage independent investigations into a classic hoax of Homeric proportions.
In New York Dr. Barrett underlined the pivotal role of Noam Chomsky as a primary agent of the 9/11 cover up. In making his point the martyred former professor referred to Building 7. WTC 7 is the third World Trade Center skyscraper in New York to be downed on 9/11 in a controlled demolition. Lucky Larry Silverstein’s World Trade Center 7 was not hit by any jet. Nevertheless, this 47-story steel-frame skyscraper collapsed almost instantly into its own footprint late in the afternoon of September 11 twenty minutes after its destruction had been announced on the BBC.
Said Barrett, “In November of 2001, if Chomsky had not chosen to feed us such a diet of bull shit, but instead had eloquently pushed the whole Left towards just looking at Building 7 and then drawing the obvious conclusions, I think we’d be living in a very different and vastly better world.”
Why did Noam Chomsky intervene so quickly, aggressively and unrelentingly to persuade his admirers, including many teachers, politicians, jurists and journalists, to put aside their own critical faculties in evaluating the substance of what actually transpired in the most transformative event of the twenty-first century? Why did Chomsky rush into print his book of November 2001 to declare “the initial conclusions about 9/11 are presumably correct,” and to reassure that there would be no major “long-term restriction of rights” or “government censorship” flowing from the debacle?
In his 2006 volume entitled, Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-Up of 9/11, Barrie Zwicker devotes a chapter to “The Shame of Noam Chomsky and the Gatekeepers of the Left.” (pages 179-224) This seminal chapter was accompanied by a series of short documentaries by Snowshoe Productions now published on You Tube by Yoryvrah. Zwicker explains that he was once “a fan, a protégé and a booster” of Noam Chomsky. In these print and video publications, Zwicker describes how prior to 9/11 he voraciously read many of Chomsky’s books. The investigative reporter and teacher included a number of Chomsky’s articles in the curriculum of the journalism courses he taught at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Zwicker corresponded with his former role model on a collegial basis. There exists public acknowledgment of Zwicker’s contribution to the gestation process of Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky’s 1992 co-authored book accompanied by a documentary film project. The Canadian journalist interviewed Chomsky twice, once in the 1990s and the second time in Hamilton Ontario in 2002. In the second interview Chomsky responded dismissively to Zwicker’s questions on 9/11. The visiting scholar referred to critiques of the official narrative of 9/11 as “conspiracy theories.”
Chomsky’s flippant reference to a notoriously engineered meme, namely his mention of “conspiracy theories,” amounts to the purposeful deployment of a tactic aimed at blocking critical and thoughtful exchange. Chomsky’s resort to this overworked cliché caused Zwicker to begin the process of re-evaluating the work of the MIT professor. By using without irony the uncontextualized term “conspiracy theorist”, Chomsky signaled his unwillingness to engage in open-minded dialogue on a difficult yet vital topic. Chomsky’s refusal to engage in honest evidence-based discussion about 9/11 alerted Zwicker that his US guest could sometimes be “intellectually dishonest.” Zwicker would subsequently learn that Chomsky was not above resorting to cheap “put down phrases” and “bizarre non-sequiturs.”
Both Zwicker and Barrett are far from alone in noticing that Chomsky defends both the government narrative of 9/11 as well as the now-discredited government myth that a sole gunman acting independently killed former US President John F. Kennedy. When pressed to provide clarification on both positions Chomsky notoriously resorts to rhetorical dismissals like “Who cares?” or “What does it matter?” Of course it matters a great deal who did 9/11 and who killed Kennedy. A conclusive and honest answer to both questions would reveal much about how we are governed and who is really in control.
In Towers of Deception, Zwicker deals not only with America’s most highly-publicized professor, but also with many foundation-funded alternative media that followed Chomsky’s lead in avoiding honest critical analysis of the originating events of the 9/11 Wars.
Among the Left Gatekeeper institutions Zwicker identifies are Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, Michael Albert’s Z Magazine, David Corn’s The Nation and many other venues including The Progressive, Mother Jones and South End Press. In summing up his commentary on “The Shame of Noam Chomsky,” Zwicker observed, “When he is not appearing to undermine the American Empire, which is the main thing he does, [Chomsky] is buttressing it by undermining the most effective and therefore dangerous foe the Empire faces—the conscious Left.”
Zwicker asks:
How many could imagine that the person warning you is one of the most perilous against whom you’ll need to defend yourself? That he is the fire marshal who wires your house to burn down, the lifeguard who drowns you, the doctor with a disarming bedside manner who administers a fatal injection? If Noam Chomsky did not exist, the diaboligarchy would have to invent him. To the New World Order, he is worth 50 armored divisions. (page 224)
Zwicker’s comparison of Chomsky to a very large grouping of military units is striking and apt given what we now know. Ironically Chomsky made his name and fame drawing attention to the role of propaganda in manufacturing consent for war and contemporary colonization. Disinfo agent Michael Shermer has replicated this strategy of seeming to expose the very tactic he utilizes to advance the interests of power.
A disingenuous TV professor with a penchant for misrepresenting his limited academic credentials, Shermer is editor of the deep-state funded Skeptic Magazine that is anything but skeptical when it comes to addressing the lies and crimes of 9/11.
You will read “Inside Job? Inside What?” in the next part.
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Fourth part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question” Read the third part here.
Back in 2006 all but a prescient few, such as Christopher Bollyn, perceived it as premature to try to identify and bring to justice the actual perpetrators of the 9/11 crimes. There was still some residue of confidence that responsible officials in government, law enforcement, media and the universities could and would respond in good faith to multiple revelations that great frauds had occurred in interpreting 9/11 for the public.
Accordingly, the main methodology of public intellectuals like Dr. Kevin Barrett or, for instance, Professors David Ray Griffin, Steven E. Jones, Peter Dale Scott, Graeme MacQueen, John McMurtry, Michael Keefer, Richard B. Lee, A.K. Dewdney, Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, and Michel Chossudovsky, was to marshal evidence demonstrating that the official narrative of 9/11 could not be true.
The marshaling of evidence was spurred on by observations coming from government insiders like Eckehardt Wertherbach, a former head of Germany’s intelligence service. In a meeting in Germany with Christopher Bollyn and Dr. Andreas von Bülow, Wertherbach pointed out that, “an attack of this magnitude and precision would have required years of planning. Such a sophisticated operation would require the fixed frame of a state intelligence organization, something not found in a loose group like the one led by the student Mohammed Atta in Hamburg.”
Andreas von Bülow was a German parliamentarian and Defense Ministry official. He confirmed this assessment in his book on the CIA and 9/11. In the text von Bülow remarked that the execution of the 9/11 plan “would have been unthinkable without backing from secret apparatuses of state and industry.” The author spoke of the “invented story of 19 Muslims working with Osama bin Laden in order the hide the truth” of the real perpetrators’ identity.
In the early years the pioneer researchers and organizers of the 9/11 Truth Movement began the process of marshaling evidence that demonstrated beyond any shadow of doubt that the original narrative of the 9/11 crimes could not be true. From this it followed that the public was entitled to a credible and true explanation, from the responsible authorities, about what really transpired on 9/11. To arrive at this outcome the Bush administration’s now-thoroughly-discredited 9/11 Commission Report, sometimes also known as the Kean-Hamilton report, would have to be put aside.
Released in 2004, the 9/11 Commission Report was drafted primarily by the Commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow. Zelikow is a history professor who was a well-known political operative active in the Bush White House. Zelikow was a prominent member of the Israeli First network in and around the war cabinet and staff of US President George W. Bush. Zelikow is recognized for his professional expertise in studying, creating and deploying public mythology as a tool for the shaping of public attitudes and behavior.
The chairs of the 9/11 Commission failed to stop Zelikow from drawing on counterfeit evidence obtained illegally through torture. Zelikow deployed this tainted testimony to embed, in the conscious and subconscious minds of the trusting public, the religious fable of 9/11. The 9/11 Commission Report entrenched in public mythology the imagery of demonic Islamic extremists motivated exclusively by their theocratic zealotry.
The new investigation called for by many prominent members of the 9/11 Truth Movement would have to transcend the realm of partisan politics; it would have had to be staffed by neutral parties of high esteem capable of rendering genuine third-party adjudication that goes to the very roots and origins of the 9/11 crime. To this day no such honest investigation has taken place. Meanwhile the citizens’ investigation of 9/11 has continued to bring forward more and more evidence that proves conclusively that from September 11, 2001 until this day, authorities are lying to the public about 9/11 and many related topics. Thus the lies of 9/11 continue to form the basis of public policy, the basis of decisions made everyday about who lives and who dies.
The scope and depth of the citizens’ investigation on 9/11 is hard to fathom in terms of the number of researchers involved, the diversity of specific topics covered, and the array of various types of expert knowledge brought to the project of separating fact from fiction. As one observer has noted, “In the annals of history, no event has ever been so thoroughly dissected by as many disparate humans as the 9/11/01 Massacre.”
Of course the quality of the work being developed in the field of 9/11 studies spans the spectrum from excellent to poor. This variation has resulted in the evolution of improvised versions of peer review that developed among experts both inside and outside the halls of academia. Some, like Noam Chomsky, choose to mock and demean these people’s process of distinguishing empirically demonstrable truth from the lies of corrupt officialdom. Why would Chomsky show such contempt and to what end?
What must always be born in mind is that the citizens’ investigation into 9/11 is first and foremost a public service done because the responsible authorities have failed to do their jobs. The authorities have acted criminally at worst, contrary to the public interest at best. Our compromised and discredited officials have failed almost uniformly to provide citizens with a credible explanation for a major event that has significantly transformed all our lives decidedly for the worse. So far the negative fallout has rained down with particular severity on Muslims. Millions of them have been killed, maimed, poisoned, displaced, and tortured in a series of wars all originating in a specious interpretation of what transpired on 9/11.
There is still no end in sight to the murder and mayhem. The failure to address the crimes of 9/11 with truth rather than with the constant resort to the 9/11 fable has become a major factor in the delegitimization of government. Never has public confidence been lower in our most basic institutions of governance, finance, policing, education, and media of mass communications.
In the decade since 2006 the realization has grown that there is little chance that those in charge of our core institutions would dare press for a genuine investigation to identify the real nature and perpetrators of the 9/11 crimes. The elaborate 9/11 operation itself and the subsequent cover up implicate too many powerful agencies, groups and individuals.
Understanding the deep corruption permeating the system over which the 9/11 culprits still rule, is changing the attitudes of many of those who have taken the time to study 9/11 for themselves. Given the unwillingness of officialdom to protect the public interest, those leading the citizens’ investigation into 9/11 are increasingly inclined to name and shame the most credibly accused suspects who so far have been able to evade accountability by framing, blaming, manipulating and smearing Muslims.
A recent illustration of the depth of this scam is exposed in the machinations of the kangaroo court at the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Along with four supporting actors, the supposed “mastermind of 9/11,” the oft tortured Khalid Sheik Mohammed, is subject to the travesty of a psychological operation going forward under the guise of a legal proceeding.
The Guantanamo Military Commission has been ordered to direct ultimate blame for the 9/11 debacle on a manipulated cast of patsies performing parodies of Islamic extremism. This farce of litigation, this betrayal of due process, forms a telling illustration of the degradation of our criminal justice systems. Like many other institutions essential to the survival of free and democratic societies, our criminal justice systems are being trashed to protect the real culprits responsible for the lies and crimes of 9/11.
Prominent among those that should be put on trial, including for the 9/11 cover up, are Michael Chertoff, Larry Silverstein, Dov Zakheim, Richard Perle, Benjamin Netanyahu, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, Shalom Yoran, Arnon Milchan, Jules Kroll, Philip Zelikow, Ash Carter, Robert Gates, Ronald Lauder, William Kristol, Judge Alvin Hellerstein, Judge Michael Mukasey, Jonathan Kay, Michael Shermer, David Frum, Karl Rove, General Richard Myers, David Aaronovitch, Rupert Murdoch, Rita Katz, Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz, Pam Geller, Robert Spencer, Paul Godfrey, and, as we shall see, Noam Chomsky.
As years pass, the 9/11 cover up is becoming the central element of the 9/11 crime. The logistics of the cover up involve the manipulation of the mainstream media and other strategic institutions including our courts, schools and universities. As Howard Baker observed when reflecting on the abbreviated presidency of Richard Nixon, “it is almost always the cover up rather than the event that causes trouble.” It is difficult to fathom the enormity of the enterprise of keeping alive the absurd Islamophobia-inducing fable of 9/11, let alone the smaller scale sequels of false flag terror events required to keep large portions of the public in constant states of fear, confusion, uncertainty, disorientation and angst.
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Third part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
Over decades Chomsky has moved towards the center of formidable networks of academic associations, publishing enterprises, activist groups, speakers forums and New Media operations. The fact that the senior professor is so well wired into such an effective communication grid of activist interaction has hugely amplified his voice and his influence.
Chomsky’s ideas have been broadcast to the far corners of the world in every conceivable format. His work is translated into many languages as the MIT professor goes from honor to honor, distinction to distinction, all the while seeming to combat the expansionary impulses emanating from some of the world’s leading centers of power including those in Israel. The phenomenal success of Chomsky’s career would seem to prove and illustrate that there is still some substance in the conception of America as the land of the free, home of the brave.
Dr. Barrett’s career path presents a very different picture of the role of the academy in US society. Barrett is the child of a strong Wisconsin family that also embodied many classic elements in the American Dream. Kevin Barrett’s father, Peter, was a lawyer, engineer, finance professor and successful businessman. He also became an Olympic Gold Medalist in sailing in 1968.
In 1964 Barrett’s father would have won a gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics if he had not disqualified himself at the end of a sailing competition by confessing that (not noticed by anyone else) he had lightly brushed against another boat early in the race.
In 2006 Kevin Barrett is reported to have referred to this episode during the ordeal of his trial by media. This public inquisition came about as a result of Kevin Barrett’s incorporation of views skeptical of the dominant 9/11 narrative into his pedagogy at the University of Wisconsin. Drawing implicit connections between his father’s decision in Tokyo and his own insistence on integrating the quest for 9/11 truth into the broader panorama of his academic work, the young academic commented, “Cheating for strategic advantage is never right. It’s important to follow the truth no matter what.”
Much is revealed by the contrasting treatment delivered on the dissident academic Kevin Barrett and on Leftist superstar Noam Chomsky. Dr. Barrett’s career so far runs against the Hollywood version of how the heroic deeds and revelations of whistle blowers are received. In the Hollywood version of redemption through unrelenting truth telling, the solitary hero often ends up overcoming the deceit of corrupt and ruthless opponents. The honesty of the solitary hero is made to triumph, thereby saving civilization along with innocent civilians from horrific cataclysms.
In real life America, however, this scenario of redemption through truth telling is more the aberration than the rule. Most whistle blowers are met with silence, avoidance and denigration of the type that Noam Chomsky has heaped on Kevin Barrett. The more common scenario of whistle blowing in America is for the truth teller to be sidelined and crushed in a harsh system of institutionalized cover-up hugely biased towards the rule of money and political expediency.
From Operation Gladio to the False Flag Terror Events
Animating the “Global War on Terror”
Dr. Barrett’s talk at the Left Forum in May of 2016 helped break an ideological prohibition at a venue that had previously blocked presentations by investigators that share some of his views. For fourteen years, any and all thinkers that rejected the official narrative of 9/11 were excluded, including those situated intellectually along the left-oriented spectrum of political identification.
The Left Form is an outgrowth of the annual Socialist Scholars’ Conference at City University of New York. In Barrett’s view Chomsky became the virtual Pope of the Left Forum Vatican, a venue peopled by admirers prone to revere their secular Pontiff as sacrosanct and infallible. In helping to break the hold of such an unseemly intellectual exclusion of 9/11 skeptics, Barrett brought to the proceedings his own unique style of Truth jihad. With his struggle to bring truth into the light of public awareness, the Muslim American scholar helped liberate free speech in a forum that during the Cold War was itself infested with the depredations of anti-communist witch hunts.
A convert to Islam since 1992, Dr. Barrett learned Arabic on the way to his writing his Ph.D. thesis on Sufi literature. In 2006 he was ousted from his position as a Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin where he had taught since 1996. Barrett’s alleged crime was to have assigned skeptical as well as orthodox readings on 9/11 in one of his seventeen weeks of classes in an introductory course entitled Islam: Religion and Culture.
In retrospect, Dr. Barrett was adapting his curriculum to a subject with huge ramifications for Muslims in all walks of life the world over. The real academic crime in this situation would have been for an instructor of a survey course on Muslim thought, devotion and experience to have ignored this reality; to have evaded some sort of reckoning with the immense implications of 9/11 for the Islamic world.
Dr. Barrett’s reasonable pedagogical response to major changes in global geopolitics became fraught with controversy of great strategic significance for the future of our academic institutions. The Rupert Murdoch media in the United States, but especially Fox News, became an especially forceful engine of the bandwagon on which many ambitious publicity-seeking politicians jumped. For a time the University of Wisconsin held the sacred ground of academic freedom. Its academic leaders found in an internal investigation that Dr. Kevin Barrett had been conscientious presenting a wide array of competing perspectives on 9/11.
The fact that Dr. Barrett is a Muslim himself formed a significant part of the circumstances that caused him to be singled out. His inquisitors in the media chose to transform him into a symbol of those said to be attacking the American way through the subversion of American youth.
Much evidence supports the view that the most important motivating factor in the planning, implementation and cover up of the ongoing 9/11 operation has been to inject fear of Islamic religion and Muslim people into the minds of non-Muslim populations. The aim of this purposeful contamination of the mental environment is to transform Israel’s regional enemies, but especially the Palestinians, into one part of a larger transnational Muslim enemy said to be hostile to all Western freedoms. As Barrett asserted at the Left Forum in New York, the 9/11 Black Op was to create the basis for a “100 year war on Muslims for Israel.”
The 9/11 culprits delivered the fabricated imagery of global Islamic terror to the proprietors and beneficiaries of America’s permanent war economy. Especially since 9/11, the strategy has been to create patsies and to sponsor covertly the recruiting, organizing, arming, and violent incursions of mercenary soldiers. Whether pictured under the flags of al-Qaeda, al-Nusra or the so-called “Islamic State”, these mercenary forces are paid handsomely to perform the role of vicious Muslim terrorists acting out of no other motivation than their own blood-thirsty religious extremism.
In this fashion the new enemy has been shaped, inflated and deployed as needed in order to justify all sorts of interventions, including aggressive warfare anywhere in the world. Under Israeli direction the core of the US political economy was thus revivified in the name of anti-terrorism. After the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s the military-industrial complex needed a new enemy. Neoconservative activists supplied “the West” with a concocted enemy. They also helped ramp up the activities of the war machine with the necessary political bribes, media propaganda and military directives aimed at transforming the US Armed Forces into an edified instrument for the expansion and further empowerment of Greater Israel.
The alignment of opposing forces in Syria well illustrates the way the core countries and satellites of the Israeli-American juggernaut have integrated mercenary forces fighting under Islamic flags into the machinery of aggressive and psychological warfare. NATO’s program of false flag terrorism in Europe was one of the models for this new round of false flag terrorism aimed at demonizing Muslims. Where the operatives of Operation Gladio engineered violent acts in the 1970s and 80s to blame and thereby demonize both communists and left-leaning progressives, the current round of serial false flag terror events is aimed at inciting Islamophobia. The manufacturing of hatred towards Muslims is a necessary psychological pillar of Likudnik Israel’s agenda of violent expansion.
A key facet of this strategy of tension is the increasingly transnationalized and privatized police state that has become deeply intertwined with a massively augmented surveillance state. Since 9/11 the apparatus of law enforcement has been thoroughly politicized and turned against the human rights, civil liberties and public interests of citizens. Without a doubt the quality of life has declined significantly, as the instruments of Cold War anti-communism have been transformed into agencies supposedly devoted to anti-terrorism. This concocted series of post-9/11 conflicts, starting with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, are presented in ways calculated to confuse, deceive, disorient and mislead an anxiety-ridden public. Police and military coercion to hold and expand empire are misrepresented as simple fights for and against “terror.”
This phony war on terror originates in the 9/11 deceptions. This phony war draws on a long heritage of duplicity in international banking, where the same financiers loan money to both sides in conflicts. In many core episodes in the so-called Global War on Terror, both sides are subject to the control of the same paymasters, the same high-finance power brokers. In this heavily engineered series of manufactured conflicts, citizens expected to pay the enormous cost of these military operations are plunged into a fog of war. Whole populations are deceived, distracted and mercilessly exploited. We are presented with a barrage of alarming media images constantly signaling to us that our most menacing enemy on earth is the scourge of Islamic terrorism.
One of many intended consequences is to divert our attention away from our growing subjugation to the bondage of compounded debt enslavement. This theft is imposed through the machinations of the world’s centralized private banks. These kleptocratic institutions exploit the indebtedness of nations to privatize the ownership of commonly-held infrastructures and resources, all the while forcing governments to cut back resources for public services like health care, education and social security.
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Second part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”.
In his recent presentation at the “Left Forum” in New York, Kevin Barrett didn’t mince words. He rarely does. Barrett accused the 87-year old Noam Chomsky of contributing to the fast deterioration of the human condition by purposely diverting skeptical attention away from the true culprits responsible for the lies and crimes of September 11, 2001. In his essay, “Why Chomsky is Wrong on 9/11,” Barrett extended a growing trajectory of suspicion questioning the real agenda motivating America’s most highly publicized professor. What is behind Dr. Chomsky’s zeal to obstruct fair and balanced professional debate about contested interpretations of 9/11?
The contradictions are conspicuous between Chomsky’s oft’ proclaimed ideals as an academic investigator and the personalized vitriol of his attacks on those exposing the litany of lies permeating the most transformative event of the twenty-first century. The stakes in this matter are high indeed given the hagiographic extremes associated with Prof. Chomsky’s worldwide reputation. In the eyes of millions, Chomsky is the primary academic embodiment of anti-establishment dissidence within the US system of higher education.
Barrett’s critique of Chomsky adds to the observations of an already sizeable list of public intellectuals that have come to the conclusion that the celebrity Prof is not what he seems to be. The increasingly insistent accusation is that the crude diversionary tactics deployed by Prof. Chomsky in discouraging skeptical investigation of 9/11 reveals him to be a Trojan horse that has succeeded in subverting the Left from within. Among the commentators that have strongly criticized Chomsky’s work as a limited hangout are Ken Adachi, Barrie Zwicker, Daniel L. Abrahamson, James Corbett, Jeff Blankfort, Douglas Herman, Alfred Schaefer, and Benjamin Marhav.
Chomsky in discouraging skeptical investigation of 9/11 reveals him to be a Trojan horse that has succeeded in subverting the Left from within.
Internet broadcaster James Corbett has encapsulated the consternation concerning the obvious contradictions internal to Chomsky’s academic work. Depending on his subject, Chomsky develops themes that contrapuntally expose and promote the workings of empire. Corbett has argued, “Whatever Chomsky is doing, he is functioning as if he’s working hand in hand with the very elite he proclaims to be fighting against.”
“Intellectuals Are In a Position to Expose the Lies of Government”
Chomsky’s academic work began in the 1950s in the field of linguistics. Chomsky’s analysis of speech, the primary medium of communicative interaction among humans, highlights his theories about the universality of mental structures governing the convergence of perception, abstraction, and articulation. Chomsky famously imagined a “black box” of language formulation as part of a universal feature of human brains. Chomsky’s metaphors on human mental hardware naturally attracted the attention of deep state operatives in the CIA and related agencies with a professional interest in influencing human attitudes and behaviors.
The scholar’s original academic discipline, therefore, provided him with an excellent platform from which to launch his applied study of the connections linking propaganda to contemporary imperialism and warfare. Since the late 1960s Chomsky has entered the outer stratosphere of intellectual notoriety, both pro and con, based on his very public interventions into the big contemporary issues of life and death, war and peace. From his very secure base of academic tenure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Prof. Chomsky would emerge in the final decades of the twentieth century to become probably the most recognized and oft quoted professor in the entire history of American higher education.
Beginning with his opposition to US military intervention in Indochina, Chomsky applied his expertise in linguistic manipulation to the study of the media’s role in manufacturing consent for many nefarious operations. In a 1967 article entitled “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Chomsky explained his intervention in what was then the most contentious issue in domestic and international politics. In hard-hitting prose that created markers against which Chomsky’s position on 9/11 would later be measured, the MIT professor wrote, “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”
While all citizens have the responsibility to oppose deceptions and crimes committed on our behalf, intellectuals have an added weight of responsibility to act in the public interest against state terror and injustice. “Intellectuals,” he wrote, “are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.”
A Jewish Sage and Lawgiver Preaching from
New England’s Most Prestigious Academic Pulpit
The contrasting treatment of Kevin Barrett and of Noam Chomsky by the custodians of US higher education forms a revealing backdrop against which to appreciate the deeper implications of the former’s assessment of the latter at the Left Forum. In recent decades Chomsky’s dramatic career has come to be invested with a kind of Hollywoodized aura. For his adept and incredibly prolific jabs directed at corporate giants, war hawks and the like, Chomsky was embraced as the Left’s most tireless warrior of the pen. He is a wordsmith of the first order who, in his spoken language, articulates frequently with such precise effect that transcripts of his speeches, interviews and panel discussions are often quickly transcribed to become popular publications.
Many have come to think of Chomsky as a kind of secular prophet seeking to inspire his followers to save America from its own worst attributes. The intensity of Chomsky’s mission to redeem America invokes Old Testament ideals of the City on the Hill, the New Jerusalem. The theocratic ideals associated with the creation of a New Jerusalem in the New World have churned through the dynamic matrix of US history ever since the Calvinist Puritans founded New England. New England’s founding Protestant patriarchs conceived of themselves as Israelites, as God’s Chosen People chartered by the Lord to realize a special evangelical mission.
The perception that there was a divine charter underlying the Puritans’ creation of Massachusetts extended to the sense of “Manifest Destiny” invoked to explain and justify the transcontinental expansion of the US republic in the nineteenth century. American exceptionalism is the term currently used to identify the secular outgrowth of the old religious justifications for imperial expansion. The psychology of God-given exceptionalism has animated US expansionism throughout its transition from transcontinental to hemispheric to trans-Pacific to global proportions.
In seeming to lead the Left’s quest for the Promised Land of liberation from corporatist tyranny, Chomsky has come to embody key elements of the American Dream. A strong statement is seemingly announced by the fact that Chomsky has been able to perform his dissenting role from a place of tenured academic security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With Harvard and about twenty other prestigious universities nearby, MIT is one of the most well established, stable, and safe platforms of intellectual power in the United States.
Chomsky’s academic home is well known for its old, deep and elaborate ties with the research arms of the military-industrial complex and its attending agencies of so-called national security. In spite of the military attachments and connotations of his academic home, however, Prof. Chomsky was permitted to thrive as a leading critic of the very interests that contributed significantly to his reputation and primary livelihood. One apparent implication of Chomsky’s career path is that a key institution at the very strategic core of the American superpower was made to appear accepting of radical criticism from within. This accommodation of Chomsky’s scholarly political activism conveyed the implicit message that the USA continues to be alive to constant adaptive change in response to a never-ending need for intellectual and logistical renewal.
Shakespearian chords resonate through the drama that has culminated in Professor Chomsky becoming the most high profile academic elder of Cambridge Massachusetts. The scholar grew into the role of a Jewish sage and lawgiver revered as a modern-day prophet preaching from the most prestigious secular pulpit in the American capital of higher education. From this important site of power in the Promised Land where New England’s Calvinist founders once found refuge from their persecutors in Europe, the Left’s favorite scholarly jurist handed down many judgments and dictums.
Chomsky’s decision to side with power and against skeptical analysis of the lies and crimes of 9/11 would prove to be the most consequential judgment of his entire career. In a book first published in November of 2001 and in many judgments delivered extemporaneously from his academic pulpit, Prof. Chomsky condemned as heretics those engaged in skeptical investigation of 9/11. The effect of Chomsky’s fatwa on systematic research into the deep state origins and character of the 9/11 crime was the professional equivalent to an intellectual burning of heretics on the cross of professional infamy.
Chomsky’s academic oversight of the professional assault on 9/11 skeptics amounts to a twenty-first century equivalent in a professional context to the Salem Witch Trials. Indeed, New England’s heritage of Puritan witch trial proceedings is made to weave through many features of the psychological operation attached to the aggressive warfare mounted by the real protagonists of the 9/11 crimes.
By misrepresenting the scholarly and pedagogical work of Muslim academic Kevin Barrett, Prof. Chomsky has led the academic facet of the twenty-first century’s most severe and unrelenting witch hunt. The University of Wisconsin’s professional martyrdom of Dr. Kevin Barrett, whom Dr. Chomsky smears with careless disregard for even the rudimentary niceties of academic protocol, well illustrates the nature of the post-9/11 assault on reason, due process, human rights, civil liberties, evidence-based reportage and decency itself. The episode constitutes a telling illustration of the elaborate psychological operation aimed at diverting Left-leaning activists from paying close attention to the true nature of the 9/11 crime.
At the Left Forum in New York, Dr. Barrett was outspoken in holding Noam Chomsky accountable for his directing role in the Left’s failure to deal cogently with the core realities of who did what to whom in the originating event of the ongoing 9/11 Wars.
A collective open letter has been signed by many professors of international law and legal researchers. Entitled “A plea against the abusive invocation of self-defence as a response to terrorism” it has been circulating on the internet for a few weeks.
Among the signatories, of which there are more than 230 professors and almost 50 assistants/researchers (see the list available here as at 25 July; it is updated regularly by the Centre de Droit International de l´Université Libre de Bruxelles), there are distinguished members of the international law community as well younger practitioners. The objective of this collective initiative is to challenge the invocation of the legal argument of self-defence by several states in the context of the so called “war” against ISIS.
As is well known, the UN Charter has been extremely clear on the unique exception to the prohibition of the use of force since its adoption in 1945 — self-defence — and military operations authorised by Security Council under Chapter VII of the Charter. However, since 9/11, interpretations made by the United States and its allies have been made to give legal support for unilateral military operations in the territory of a state without the previous consent of its authorities. In a recent note published on the website of the European Journal of International Law (EJIL), we read that: “Particularly since 9/11, several States have supported a broad reading of the right to use force in self-defence, as allowing them to intervene militarily against terrorists whenever and wherever they may be. A consequence of that conception is that any State could be targeted irrespective of whether that State has ‘sent’ the irregular (in this case terrorist) group to carry out a military action or has been ‘substantially involved’ in such an action.”
The use of force in self-defence must be exercised in conformity with the conditions laid down in international law, and particularly the UN Charter. On this very particular point, it must be recalled that France presented to the Security Council a quite surprising draft resolution after the Paris attacks of 13 November last year (see the full text here of the “blue version” circulated among UN delegations) which avoided any reference to the Charter in its operative paragraphs; it is possibly a great “première” of French diplomacy at the United Nations and was analysed in a short note. Resolution 2249 was used a few weeks later in a British parliamentary debate to justify air strikes in Syria, without major clarifications (see this modest note about this).
The text of the global open letter (available here in French, English, Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic) considers, among other arguments, that: “Thus, numerous military interventions have been conducted in the name of self-defence, including against Al Qaeda, ISIS or affiliated groups. While some have downplayed these precedents on account of their exceptional nature, there is a serious risk of self-defence becoming an alibi, used systematically to justify the unilateral launching of military operations around the world. Without opposing the use of force against terrorist groups as a matter of principle — particularly in the current context of the fight against ISIS — we, international law professors and scholars, consider this invocation of self-defence to be problematic. In fact, international law provides for a range of measures to fight terrorism. Priority should be given to these measures before invoking self-defence.”
Furthermore, the signatories of this collective letter state: “…we consider that terrorism raises above all the challenge of prosecution and trial of individuals who commit acts of terrorism. A variety of legal tools are available in this respect. They relate first and foremost to police and judicial cooperation (chiefly through agencies such as INTERPOL or EUROPOL), aiming both at punishing those responsible for the crimes committed and preventing future occurrence of such crimes. Although there is certainly room for improvement, this cooperation has often proved effective in dismantling networks, thwarting attacks, and arresting the perpetrators of such attacks. By embracing from the outset the ‘war against terrorism’ and ‘self-defence’ paradigms and declaring a state of emergency, there is a serious risk of trivialising, neglecting, or ignoring ordinary peacetime legal processes.”
It must be noted that international law scholars and researchers around the world can sign this document until 31 July. The text recalls a certain number of very clear rules that the diplomats in New York know better than anyone — despite the ambiguous interpretations made by some of their colleagues, in particular since the beginning of air strikes in Syria, without the consent of its de facto authorities — on the extremely vague notion of an ‘unwilling or unable’ State, justifying, for some diplomats, military operations on its territory without its previous consent. I refer to this very recent article published in The Netherlands.
The collective document also states that: “…the maintenance of international peace and security rests first and foremost with the Security Council. The Council has qualified international terrorism as a threat to the peace on numerous occasions. Therefore, aside from cases of emergency leaving no time to seize the UN, it must remain the Security Council’s primary responsibility to decide, coordinate and supervise acts of collective security. Confining the task of the Council to adopting ambiguous resolutions of an essentially diplomatic nature, as was the case with the passing of resolution 2249 (2015) relating to the fight against ISIS, is an unfortunate practice. Instead, the role of the Council must be enhanced in keeping with the letter and spirit of the Charter, thereby ensuring a multilateral approach to security /…/ However, the mere fact that, despite its efforts, a State is unable to put an end to terrorist activities on its territory is insufficient to justify bombing that State’s territory without its consent. Such an argument finds no support either in existing legal instruments or in the case law of the International Court of Justice. Accepting this argument entails a risk of grave abuse in that military action may henceforth be conducted against the will of a great number of States under the sole pretext that, in the intervening State’s view, they were not sufficiently effective in fighting terrorism.”
It must be noted that, in February, Canada’s new government decided to cease air strikes in Syria and Iraq. We read in this official note produced by the Canadian Armed Forces that: “ In accordance with Government of Canada direction, the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) ceased air strike operations in Iraq and Syria on 15 February 2016. From their first sortie on 30 October 2014 to 15 February 2016, the CF-188 Hornets conducted 1378 sorties resulting in 251 airstrikes (246 in Iraq and 5 in Syria), expended 606 munitions and achieved the following effects: 267 ISIL fighting positions, 102 ISIL equipment and vehicles, and, 30 ISIL Improvised Explosive Device (IED) factories and ISIL storage facilities.”
In 2015, a Canadian scholar concluded an extremely interesting article on air strikes in Syria and Iraq in the following terms: “However, there is a further legal hurdle for Canada to overcome. Unless Canada can attribute ISIS´ attacks in Iraq to Syria, then the question becomes whether Canada may lawfully target ISIS, as a non-state actor in Syria’s sovereign territory, using the ‘unwilling or unable’ doctrine to prevent ISIS’ extraterritoriality attacks against Iraq. This justification moves significantly away from the Nicaragua, Congo and Israeli Wall cases’ requirement for attribution. There appears to be a lack of consensus on whether opinion juris and state practice have accepted the ‘unwilling or unable’ doctrine as customary international law. There is no escaping the conclusion that Canada’s air strikes on Syria are on shaky, or at least shifting, legal ground.”
The signatories of the open letter, the number of whom is increasing daily, include scholars from different continents and of different ages; they conclude by reaffirming that: “The international legal order may not be reduced to an interventionist logic similar to that prevailing before the adoption of the United Nations Charter. The purpose of the Charter was to substitute a multilateral system grounded in cooperation and the enhanced role of law and institutions for unilateral military action. It would be tragic if, acting on emotion in the face of terrorism (understandable as this emotion may be), that purpose were lost.”
I spent last week in Guantánamo Bay, where I was supposed to be observing four days of pre-trial hearings in the military commission prosecution of the 9/11 defendants. But as is so often the case, on three of those days, the hearings were closed. On the single day of open hearings, the proceeding focused on the government’s destruction of key evidence in the case. This past weekend, defense lawyers confirmed that the evidence concerns a secret CIA black site abroad where the defendants and others were severely tortured.
Almost 15 years have passed since the attacks of 9/11, and yet the Guantánamo military commissions are still muddling through pre-trial motions, with virtually the same confusion and lack of transparency that has characterized these proceedings for years. The dichotomy between the importance of the proceedings and their virtual absence from public discourse is astonishing.
The proceedings that did take place last week focused on the government’s destruction of evidence, which may have been irreplaceable for the defense, and over which the judge had issued a protective order. Defense attorney David Nevin, who represents Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, referred to this evidence as “among the most important evidence of the case.” As Nevin argued, the government’s torture and mistreatment of the defendants is central to the question of whether they can lawfully be subject to the death penalty.
This key issue has been percolating for some time.
More than two years ago, the judge presiding over the trial, Army Col. James L. Pohl, issued a protective order to preserve what’s now confirmed as CIA black site evidence. At some point after that, the prosecution had a closed-door hearing with Judge Pohl. Without defense counsel’s participation or even knowledge, the prosecution convinced the judge to lift the protective order, and the government then destroyed the evidence. The defense lawyers said they didn’t know that the protective order had been lifted and the evidence destroyed until 18 months after the fact, at which point it was far too late to go to court to prevent the damage. Although the prosecution characterized the lack of notice about the evidence’s destruction as “regrettable,” it claims that no harm resulted.
Because of the secret destruction of this critical evidence, the defense team requested that both the prosecution team and Judge Pohl be recused and that a separate judge decide whether recusal is appropriate. On Thursday, defending the secrecy in which the evidence was destroyed, prosecutor Bob Swann said to Judge Pohl, “There is no reason to recuse yourself. You have done nothing wrong, nor have we.”
The public doesn’t know exactly what this evidence consisted of or whether the government may still be able to remedy some of the damage. But what is important here is that evidence – in particular, evidence of torture and mistreatment of the defendants – was withheld from the defense and deliberately destroyed in one of the most important capital cases in U.S. history.
If I could distill one message from the prosecution’s argument on Thursday, it was this: The government’s right to secrecy trumps other considerations, including the defendants’ rights. This argument applied to evidence of the shocking torture to which these men were subjected, rendering it an inconvenient but irrelevant fact. With public support for torture on the rise and a presidential candidate who openly applauds torture and wants to return to the most extreme forms of inhuman and degrading treatment, the government’s apparent efforts to obfuscate its use of torture are deeply troubling.
When these proceedings began, the Bush-era torture policies were still in place. When Obama came into office in 2009, he confirmed an end to those policies, renounced torture, and vowed to close the Guantánamo detention center within a year. Now, nearly eight years later, Guantánamo is still open, and the most important terrorism trial in our country’s history is stumbling through initial proceedings, marred by yet more allegations of government misconduct.With President Obama’s departure on the horizon and his legacy at stake, there has been nothing that resembles justice coming out of these Guantanamo tribunals.
Below is an excerpt of Monika Schafer’s 2015 resignation letter. In it she lays out her reasons for no longer wanting to be part of the Green Party of Canada. Basically Ms. Schaefer accuses Ms. May of betraying her promise to speak truth to power. Ms. Schaefer accuses Ms. May of knowingly going along with what the Green Party leader well understands is a fraudulent interpretation of what really happened on 9/11. The effect of Ms. May going along with the lies of 9/11 is to maintain in positions of power those most responsible for perpetrating the crimes that have lea to millions of deaths in the still-continuing 9/11 wars and the ongoing torrent of false flag terror events.
To: Elizabeth May, Leader of the Green Party of Canada Subject: why I am cancelling my membership Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2015 14:38:38 -0600
Dear Elizabeth May,
After many years of loyal Green Party involvement, including attending the founding convention of the GPC in 1983, and being the Yellowhead candidate in the last three general federal elections, not to mention the thousands of dollars of donations which I have made over the years, it is with a heavy heart that I am officially cancelling my Green Party membership effective immediately.
I have learned over the past year that even the Green Party of Canada is a controlled opposition party. There is no room for speaking the truth about current events in the Green Party of Canada. At first I gave the benefit of the doubt to you and others, because I understood that everyone is on their own learning curve, just as I was. We have all been subjected to a lifetime of training, indoctrination, education, mind-control, call it what you will, we have been brainwashed. I tried very hard to give you and others the information that would lead to your understanding of who is really pulling the strings of our government representatives, playing them like puppets.
At risk of repeating myself, I will again quote Voltaire who said: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” Indeed, did Stephen Harper not say that anyone who criticizes Israel is anti-semitic? Being labelled anti-semitic is akin to being labelled terrorist. And we know what Bill C-51 can do to anyone with that label!
Elizabeth May, I have enjoyed our friendship. I have had such deep respect for your wisdom and intelligence. However, I am extremely disappointed that you have allowed political expediency to compromise your integrity and cloud your vision, when you were always the one who said you would speak truth to power, uncompromisingly.
9/11 is the litmus test. It is the defining event of our times. It is what triggered the fraudulent War on Terror. It was a false-flag event! If you (and all the other MPs) are not able or willing to talk about it, then that proves that you (and all the other MPs) are controlled by the very cabal of people that brought us that event.
The frequency of subsequent false flag events is increasing. London, Bali, Madrid, Boston, Ottawa, and Paris. These events are always followed by a ratcheting-up of restrictions on freedoms and rights. Bill C-51 is a case in point.
The Zionist New World Order agenda does not bode well for the future of our species let alone all life on this beautiful Mother Earth. If we truly want to implement the Green Vision which you and I both care about so deeply, we need to get to the root of who is in control of our media, our banks and our governments. We need to expose and bring down the criminal cabal now in charge in order to take back our future…….
Recently Paul Craig Roberts recounted a conversation he had with James Jesus Angleton, a former head of CIA counterintelligence, in which they discussed strategies that the CIA employs to dupe the American and global public, with a view to perpetrating criminal agendas, cloaked beneath the lie of “national interests”. Angleton explained to Roberts that,
“intelligence services create stories inside stories, each with its carefully constructed trail of evidence, in order to create false trails as diversions. Such painstaking work can serve a variety of purposes … Then if the official story gets into trouble, the backup story can be released in order to deflect attention into a new false story or to support the original story.”
The strategy of “stories within stories”, and using competing narratives to confuse, to distract, and to lead the public down false paths (red herrings) is entirely consistent with the 9/11 crimes, the subsequent “War On Terror”, and the criminal invasion of Syria.
The official stories explaining the 9/11 false flag are bundled with hidden stories, “limited hangouts”, and “distance from accountability” strategies — all serving to daze and confuse North Americans in particular, to the point where we revert to passively accepting the narrative of the day and the overarching lie that supporting the neo-con war agenda is patriotic.
The first 9/11 story – Story A – identified al Qaeda and Bin Laden as the primary perpetrators, but this story is being supplanted by another story – story B – which features Saudi Arabia as the villain. No doubt Saudi Arabia played a role in the crime and the on-going cover-up, but “Story B” is also a “limited hangout” in the sense that only a limited part of the story is “hanging out”. It also serves to provide cover or “distance from accountability” for some of the major villains who are still shielded from the glare of the spotlight. Additionally, it serves to lead us down false trails (red herring) that divert public attention from the hidden agenda of global war and poverty.
The Saudi Arabia limited hangout does beg an important question though: Will the CIA’s Wahhabi mercenary outfits — ISIS, al Qaeda/ al Nursra Front, and all the fraudulently labelled “moderates”, be targeting Saudi Arabia next?
The same strategy of “stories within stories” is occurring with the West’s criminal war of aggression on Syria.
“Washington’s plan for a New Middle East – with compliant states across the region – is failing. Their Plan B is to partition or otherwise divide Syria and Iraq. Their Plan C will be to withdraw while pretending that they have helped bring peace to the region.”
The original Plan A: to quickly destroy democratic, pluralist, non-sectarian Syria with Western and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) backed terrorist invaders — with a view to setting up a stooge Wahhabi-style dictatorship, is failing. Not only are the terrorists being defeated on the battlefield, but the psy op “strategy of disassociation” is crumbling as well. More and more people are seeing through the lies of the “moderate rebel” story: the Western/GCC – backed “moderates” (all of whom share the same strategic ambitions as ISIS and the West) are at least as bad, maybe worse than their “comrades in arms”, “ISIS”. When U.S State Department spokesperson Mark Toner explained that they might put a “pause” on funding the so-called “moderates”, who publicly and brazenly chopped off the head of a Palestinian boy, the “strategy of disassociation” was beheaded as well.
Plan B is also failing, at least in Syria, since the “balkanization” efforts at creating ethnically or religiously-based enclaves within Syria is hitting the wall of Syria’s longstanding culture of religious freedom and pluralism. Syrians identify themselves first and foremost as Syrians, and not according to their religious affiliations.
Hopefully, Plan C is around the corner. The West will pretend that it has achieved peace, and it will withdraw its disgusting terrorist proxies.
Despite the fake reporting, the fake NGOs, the “stories within stories”, the indolence and criminality of the corporate presstitutes, the ugly truth is imposing itself on Western audiences, whether they like it or not.
Just peace requires this uncomfortable foundation of truth.
Human trafficking is certainly one of the most monstrous mass criminal activities ever undertaken by other humans (although calling them “humans” is a bit of a stretch). And yet, there’s a special kind of this deeply repulsive crime that pushes it to diabolical proportions – child trafficking. Underage kids, particularly those who were abandoned, sold or have very poor/abusive family backgrounds, are by far the most vulnerable group. The depraved criminals who engage in such illicit activities specifically target unfortunate children and given there are millions of them all around the globe, particularly in war-torn areas, the “recruitment pool” is effectively endless. Unfortunately, the demand on the black market also seems to be constant and growing, making it a very lucrative and appealing prospect for criminals. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News
