I had one of those fitful sleeps. I kept waking up with a start only to discover that I wasn’t ready to get out of bed. But each time I came to, I had a different article partially composed in my head.
The last one was entitled “Don’t make me connect the dots”, and I know why my subconscious was thinking about dot connection. It’s because I spent a good part of last night re-reading jpol’s classic media exposes How All the News About Political Assassinations In the United States
Has Not Been Fit to Print in The New York Times and JFK: How the Media Assassinated the Real Story.
I also read a good chunk of Real History Lisa’s two part article David Atlee Phillips,
Clay Shaw
and Freeport Sulphur and JFK, Indonesia, CIA & Freeport Sulphur. The NY Times recently did an expose on Freeport Sulphur, now known as Freeport McMoRan.
I don’t know how many of you come to blogs to read thirty-three year old articles about how the New York Times is running interference for the Warren Commission. But if you take the time to read these types of articles, a lot of scales will fall from your eyes. You may not suddenly realize that you are married to your mother after having killed your father, but you will understand that Judy Miller and Bob Woodward are not aberrations in the history of this country.
If there is a similarity between the JFK assassination and 9/11 it is in the race to provide a definitive explanation for what happened and who was responsible, followed by a pliant media failing to question the official line, followed by a commission that did not do an honest job of investigating. And then everyone fell in line to marginalize anyone who didn’t accept the commission reports as the gospel.
Regardless of who killed JFK, the lesson was obvious: provide future Presidents with better Secret Service protection. But in the case of 9/11, the lessons are still obscure. On the one hand, we know to improve airline security. But, on the other hand, we still do not know what to do to prevent people from wanting to carry out such attacks. And that is largely why we somehow found ourselves in Iraq. Without an honest discussion of why we were attacked (and it wasn’t because Saddam Hussein hates our freedoms) it was easy for BushCo. to sidetrack the entire Establishment into one big year-long bloodthirsty bout of cheerleading for an ill-conceived invasion of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.
The New York Times and Washington Post were at the forefront of the cheerleading and they are not too keen to revisit their performance now. The only people that are really pursuing this story are the leakers at the CIA, State Department, Pentagon, and NSA, and the independent journalists and bloggers that are unafraid to pursue the truth.
If we get out too far on a limb we are knocked down as conspiracy theorists. But the invasion of Iraq was the biggest conspiracy of all time. And we can’t be expected to be able to connect all the dots. Only the corporate media has the contacts and assets needed to unravel this travesty.
If history is any guide, they will fail to do their job.
