Gullible Americans and the Fear of Terrorism

Written by former republican Treasury Secretary for Ronald Reagan.
Just in case you thought your uplane was about to be blown up.
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GULLIBLE AMERICANS
By Paul Craig Roberts
vdare.com
August 14, 2006

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/060814_gullible.htm

I was in China when a July Harris Poll reported that 50 percent of Americans
still believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when Bush invaded
that country and that 64 percent of Americans still believe that Saddam
Hussein had strong links with al-Qaida.

The Chinese leaders and intellectuals with whom I was meeting were
incredulous. How could a majority of the population in an allegedly free
country with an allegedly free press be so totally misinformed?

The only answer I could give the Chinese is that Americans would have been
the perfect population for Mao and the Gang of Four, because Americans
believe anything their government tells them.

Americans never check any facts. Who do you know, for example, who has even
read the report of the 9-11 commission, much less checked the alleged facts
reported in that document. I can answer for you. You don’t know anyone who
has read the report or checked the facts.

The two co-chairmen of the 9-11 commission report, Thomas Kean and Lee
Hamilton, have just released a new book, “Without Precedent: The Inside
Story of the 9-11 Commission.” Kean and Hamilton reveal that the commission
suppressed the fact that Muslim ire toward the United States is due to U.S.
support for Israel’s persecution and dispossession of the Palestinians, not
to our “freedom and democracy,” as Bush propagandistically claims. Kean and
Hamilton also reveal that the U.S. military committed perjury and lied about
its failure to intercept the hijacked airliners. The commission even debated
referring the military’s lies to the Justice Department for criminal
investigation. Why should we assume that these admissions are the only
cover-ups and lies in the 9-11 commission report?

How do you know that 9-11 was a Muslim terrorist plot? How do you know that
three World Trade Center buildings collapsed because two were hit by
airliners? You only “know” because the government gave you the explanation
of what you saw on TV. (Did you even know that three WTC buildings
collapsed?)

I still remember the enlightenment I experienced as a student in Russian
studies when I learned that the Czarist secret police would set off bombs
and then blame those whom they wanted to arrest.

When Hitler seized dictatorial power in 1933, he told the Germans that his
new powers were made necessary by a communist terrorist attack on the
Reichstag. When Hitler started World War II by invading Poland, he told the
Germans that Poland had crossed the frontier and attacked Germany.

Governments lie all the time — especially governments staffed by
neoconservatives whose intellectual godfather, Leo Strauss, taught them that
it is permissible to deceive the public in order to achieve their agenda.

Some readers will write to me to say that they saw a TV documentary or read
a magazine article verifying the government’s explanation of 9-11. But, of
course, these Americans did not check the facts, either — and neither did
the people who made the documentary and wrote the magazine article.

Scientists and engineers, such as Clemson University Professor of
Engineering Dr. Judy Woods and BYU Professor of Physics Dr. Steven Jones,
have raised compelling questions about the official account of the collapse
of the three WTC buildings. The basic problem for the government’s account
is that the buildings are known to have fallen at free-fall speed, a fact
that is inconsistent with the government’s “pancaking” theory in which
debris from above collapsed the floors below. If the buildings actually
“pancaked,” then each floor below would have offered resistance to the
floors above, and the elapsed time would have been much longer.

These experts have also calculated that the buildings did not have
sufficient gravitational energy to accommodate the government’s theory of
the collapse. It is certainly a known and non-controversial fact among
physicists and engineers that the only way buildings can collapse at free
fall speed into their own footprints is by engineered demolition. Explosives
are used to remove the support of floors below before the debris from above
arrives. Otherwise, resistance is encountered and the time required for fall
increases.

Engineered demolition also explains the symmetrical collapse of the
buildings into their own footprints. As it is otherwise improbable for every
point in floors below to weaken uniformly, “pancaking” would result in
asymmetrical collapse as some elements of the floor would give sooner than
others.

Scientific evidence is a tough thing for the American public to handle, and
the government knows it. The government can rely on people dismissing things
that they cannot understand as “conspiracy theory.” But if you are inclined
to try to make up your own mind, you can find Jones’ and Woods’ papers,
which have been formally presented to their peers at scientific meetings,
online at:

http://www.st911.org/

Experts have also pointed out that the buildings’ giant steel skeletons
comprised a massive heat sink that wicked away the heat from the limited,
short-lived fires, thus preventing a heat buildup. Experts also point out
that the short-lived, scattered, low-intensity fires could barely reach half
the melting point of steel even if they burned all day, instead of merely an
hour.

Don’t ask me to tell you what happened on 9-11. All I know is that the
official account of the buildings’ collapse is improbable.

Now we are being told another improbable tale. Muslim terrorists in London
and Pakistan were caught plotting to commit mass murder by smuggling bottles
of explosive liquids on board airliners in hand luggage. Baby formula,
shampoo and water bottles allegedly contained the tools of suicide bombers.

How do we know about this plot? Well, the police learned it from an “Islamic
militant arrested near the Afghan-Pakistan border several weeks ago.”
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4781925.stm> And how did someone so
far away know what British-born people in London were plotting?

Do you really believe that Western and Israeli intelligence services, which
were too incompetent to prevent the 9-11 attack, can uncover a London plot
by capturing a person on the Afghan border in Pakistan? Why would “an
Islamic militant” rat on such a plot even if he knew of it?

More probable explanations of the “plot” are readily available. According to
the Aug. 11 Wayne Madsen Report, informed sources in the United Kingdom say
that “the Tony Blair government, under siege by a Labor Party revolt,
cleverly cooked up a new ‘terror’ scare to avert the public’s eyes away from
Blair’s increasing political woes. British law enforcement, neocon and
intelligence operatives in the United States, Israel and Britain, and Rupert
Murdoch’s global media empire cooked up the terrorist plot, liberally
borrowing from the failed 1995 ‘Oplan Bjinka’ plot by Pakistan- and
Philippines-based terrorist Ramzi Ahmad Yousef to crash 11 trans-Pacific
airliners bound from Asia to the U.S.”

There are other plausible explanations. For example, our puppet in Pakistan
decided to arrest some people who were a threat to him. With Bush’s
commitment to “building democracy in the Middle East,” our puppet can’t
arrest his political enemies without cause, so he lays the blame on a plot.

Any testimony against Muslim plotters by “an Islamic militant” is certain to
have been bought and paid for.

Or consider this explanation. Under the Nuremberg standard, Bush and Blair
are war criminals. Bush is so worried that he will be held accountable that
he has sent his attorney general to consult with the Republican Congress to
work out legislation to protect Bush retroactively from his violations of
the Geneva Conventions.

Tony Blair is in more danger of finding himself in the dock. Britain is
signatory to a treaty that, if justice is done, will place Blair before the
International Criminal Court in the Hague.

What better justification for the two war criminals’ illegal actions than
the need to foil dastardly plots by Muslims recruited in sting operations by
Western intelligence services? The more Bush and Blair can convince their
publics that terrorist danger abounds, the less likely Bush and Blair are
ever to be held accountable for their crimes.

But surely, some readers might object, our great moral leaders wouldn’t do
something political like that!

They most certainly would. As Joshua Micah Marshall wrote in the July 7
issue of Time magazine, the suspicion is “quite reasonable” that “the Bush
administration orchestrates its terror alerts and arrests to goose the GOP’s
poll numbers.”

Marshall proves his conclusion by examining the barrage of color-coded
terror alerts, none of which were real — and, yes, it all fits with
political needs.

And don’t forget the plot unearthed in Miami to blow up the Sears Tower in
Chicago. Described by Vice President Cheney as a “very real threat,” the
plot turned out to be nothing more than a few harmless wackos recruited by
an FBI agent sent out to organize a sting.

There was also the “foiled plot” to blow up the Holland Tunnel and flood
downtown New York City with seawater. Thinking New Orleans, the FBI invented
this plot without realizing that New York City is above sea level. Of
course, most Americans didn’t realize it, either.

For six years, the Bush regime has been able to count on the ignorant and
naive American public to believe whatever tale that is told them. American
gullibility has yet to fail the Bush regime.

The government has an endless number of conspiracy theories, but only people
who question the government’s conspiracies are derided for “having a
conspiracy theory.”

The implication is even worse if we assume that the explosive bottle plot is
genuine. It means that America and Britain by their own aggression in Iraq
and Afghanistan, and by enabling Israel’s war crimes in Palestine and
Lebanon, have created such hatred that Muslims, who identify with Bush’s,
Blair’s and Israel’s victims, are plotting retaliation.

But Bush is prepared. He has taught his untutored public that “they hate us
for our freedom and democracy.”

Gentle reader, wise up. The entire world is laughing at you.

………….

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side
Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation
and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the
co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How
Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of
Justice. Click here <http://www.vdare.com/pb/death_of_due_process.htm> for
Peter Brimelow¹s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent
epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.