[Media-watch]

[YvonneMarshall]

Dear List-members,

Another quiet night on Media-Watch. Perhaps folk are just now so war-weary and scunnered that they can't see the point any more, or maybe the sheer weight and relentlessness of the propaganda makes it almost impossible to highlight which nuggets of twisted filth to bring to the attention of others.

It might provide some 'relief' to get away from the here and now, to examine one of the main reasons used to justify the destruction of the civilisation in which literacy itself was developed.

The Sep 11th attacks remain the fundamental 'justification' for the US's current behaviour.  There remain hundreds - literally hundreds - of unanswered questions regarding what happened on that day. There still has been no official inquiry or report into what happened.

The tacit, media-peddled  'official' version of what happened (although it has never been formally published, collated, researched, authored etc etc) is flatly impossible for any sane person to believe, and yet, in this country - the UK - with its fine reputation for investigative reporting, documentary-making etc, not one mainstream broadcaster - not a single one - has dared to raise any of the glaring errors, mistruths and outright lies which masquerade unchallenged as 'the truth' of what happened on that terrible day.

For many, the very notion that Sep 11th was anything but a spectacular and audacious attack on the US and Capitalism by Big-Beard Bin Laden is simply not credible. Yes, it was Al-Qaeda, Bin-Laden. (Bin-Laden said on Sep 12th that he was right into it, thought it was great, but had nothing to do with it. Maybe his PR boys had a wee word and told him to shut-it.) Then, of course, we have to take into account that the majority of the US public believe that Iraq was behind the attacks. An alarmingly high percentage of Americans also believe (and this is according to the pollsters) that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden ARE THE SAME PERSON !! It might be instructive to see figures by these pollsters regarding what percentage of the US public actually believe the cobblers published by the pollsters, but such data is not easily available. 


Polls aside - to deny the 'official' version of events on Sep 11th is to open a Pandora's Box which exposes our own innocence and naivete as much as it exposes the sheer evil behind the attacks.  Were the moon-landings faked ? That question guarantees the speaker a black-eye in many bars all over the world, not only in the US, and we are fast approaching the point where similar queries regarding the events of Sep 11th 2001 will draw similarly violent denial - and this is before the question has even been addressed or any evidence has been surveyed. As the asking of certain questions becomes forbidden, albeit voluntarily,  so self-censorship and denial becomes endemic, irreversible. Then, inevitably, there is no such thing as 'truth' because facts (dem pesky thangs) just don't matter any more. Crucial, right now, is to ask those hard questions, and wonder whether or not they could be raised in 'decent' company, and if not, why not ? (Germans, in 1936, 37 etc, being entertained by close Jewish friends and associates must've, at some point, asked the same questions of themselves, pondered the same awkwardness as things got worse. Maybe most of them never said anything, would've denied even asking themselves the questions at all ?)

So, if you're still bearing with me, my point is this - media-watch, and many other on-line projects, were set-up to address what we all knew would be the inevitable tide of propaganda. Now, we're up to our necks in  it, but unlike a normal 'tide', it is not going to recede. The 'war', as Robert Fisk's latest reports from Iraq suggest, is really just beginning. None of us knows where it will end. But we can do our best to find out why it started, what sparked it, where and when the Neo-cons and their pliant mass-media buddies knew that the time was right to forge ahead with 'the project'. 

Maybe history is now moving so fast that none of us can reasonably expect to learn from it, but we can certainly use what is within our collective memory, backed up by the efforts of many independent writers, researchers and journalists worldwide who continue to do their thankless work despite being constantly pilloried as cranks, conspiracy-theorists etc etc.

If you, or anyone close to you, really believes the 'official' explanation of the Sep 11th attacks, please go to propagandamatrix.com. (I've no connection with the site at all, and there are many others featuring similar material, but it's one of the most comprehensive I've seen.) You'll find a short list of links on the left-hand side of the page, one of which is 'September 11th'. If you do decide to click on it, be prepared - there are maybe 600 or so links to features by writers all over the world written in the past 18-months or so, and each and every one of them - even from the titles alone - raises deeply troubling questions about what happened on that day. Taken together, they constitute a compelling case for the immediate impeachment of G W Bush and his wee pal Tony.  (Don't try to read every feature from the top-down - best to scan right down to see the various headings - it really is a huge site)

Thank you for reading this far.

At the time of writing,  the US  and UK troops have encouraged the looting of Baghdad and all other significant Iraqi cities, overseen the destruction of ancient artefacts, priceless irreplacable copies of the Koran, civil infrasturcture of all forms, and continue to suppress the innocent civilian population while they 'busy' themselves guarding oil-wells and the Oil Ministry. Disease festers in corpses on the streets and babies die for want of water. It's happening right now, and will be for months if not years. We are citizens of the 'democratic' country which helped make it happen and continues to justify it. In the eyes of the whole world, and  - if we're brave enough to admit it - in our own country,  we are all guilty, each and every one of us. Okay, maybe we couldn't and can't stop it, but surely the very least we can do now is make an effort to educate ourselves, try to find out why it's happening.

People all over the planet are asking 'why ?'.  We can find out if we look at the time-lines, the major players, the evidence that is there at the click of a mouse. It's there, but you have to look for it. List-members will be aware of this, but so many many people are not - the BBC, ITN, AP, Reuters or any other media-outfit, mainstream or otherwise, do not have any monopoly on 'truth'. They re-present various truths in the form which best suits their purposes at the time. Who decides what their purposes might be is not for us 'mere mortals' to know. But we can take the whole, examine it, swap notes, and reach reasoned, logical  conclusions. I hope that's what the List is about. (Does it close tomorrow if Tony says 'officially' that the war is over ?)

Please do check the propagandamatrix.com site. If you read even a fraction of what is there and measure it against the coverage you have seen on 'normal', 'mainstream' media over the past 18 months, it should very quickly become clear that the 'War on Terrorism', the 'War on Iraq'  - and 'The-War-Against-God-Only-Knows-Who's-Next'  - was only 'justifiable' if popular US rage and revenge was keen enough. Sep 11th was the 'new Pearl Harbor' the Neo-cons and the Project for the New American Century yearned for. How convenient it happened so soon after Dubya was installed !!

Read it and weep. Then tell your pals, argue about it in the kitchen with your folks. They won't like it. No-one does. But hey, when it comes right down to it, they can't shoot the messenger. 

Can they ?

Best regards to all,

Ian Brotherhood

 
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