The Laukev7 Report
Tuesday, February 20, 2007

George Monbiot really has gone the way of Doug Thompson.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,2017005,00.html

These conspiracy idiots are a boon for Bush and Blair as they destroy the movements some of us have spent years building

Aww, poor Monbiot whines because people want to indict Bush and Blair for their real crimes and won't listen to establishment opposition like Monbiot anymore. But as Chomsky said, who cares?

'You did this hit piece because your corporate masters instructed you to. You are a controlled asset of the new world order ... bought and paid for." "Everyone has some skeleton in the cupboard. How else would MI5 and special branch recruit agents?" "Shill, traitor, sleeper", "leftwing gatekeeper", "accessory after the fact", "political whore of the biggest conspiracy of them all".

These are a few of the measured responses to my article, a fortnight ago, about the film Loose Change, which maintains that the United States government destroyed the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Having spent years building up my leftwing credibility on behalf of my paymasters in MI5, I've blown it. I overplayed my hand, and have been exposed, like Bush and Cheney, by a bunch of kids with laptops. My handlers are furious.

I might add that you're also a drama queen and a phony intellectual who thinks that calling people disagreeing with the official story 'conspiracy idiots' is a 'measured response', even though it plays into the same line of logic as the Bushists who call criticism of Bush and his wars 'anti-patriotic' and 'anti-American', the Zionists who call criticism of Israel 'anti-Semitic', and the Democrats who tell people that calling Bush out for his fraudulent elections and demanding his impeachment would 'hurt the progressive movement' and 'scare the voters'.

You've blown your credibility, deservedly, because after years of professional journalism, you wrote a poorly researched article full of stupidities, ad hominem attacks, strawman attacks and repeated the canned pseudoscience fed to the public over and over again about the alleged psychological motivations of 'conspiracy theorists', with the expectation to detract people superficial enough to swallow your tripe from our research. And that, with the purpose of getting people to ignore those important issues, is what makes you an 'accessory after the fact'.

I believe that George Bush is surrounded by some of the most scheming, devious, ruthless men to have found their way into government since the days of the Borgias. I believe that they were criminally negligent in failing to respond to intelligence about a potential attack by al-Qaida, and that they have sought to disguise their incompetence by classifying crucial documents.

I believe, too, that the Bush government seized the opportunity provided by the attacks to pursue a longstanding plan to invade Iraq and reshape the Middle East, knowing full well that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Bush deliberately misled the American people about the links between 9/11 and Iraq and about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. He is responsible for the murder of many tens of thousands of Iraqis.

But you couldn't believe that those people ruthless enough to send more than 3000 people to their deaths in a war based on lies would have the nerve to kill their own citizens. And obviously, the fact that they stated the need for a 'New Pearl Harbor' one year before 9/11 merely meant that they took advantage of 9/11, but couldn't possibly have been complicit.

But none of this is sufficient. To qualify as a true opponent of the Bush regime, you must also now believe that it is capable of magic. It could blast the Pentagon with a cruise missile while persuading hundreds of onlookers that they saw a plane. It could wire every floor of the twin towers with explosives without attracting attention and prime the charges (though planes had ploughed through the middle of the sequence) to drop each tower in a perfectly timed collapse. It could make Flight 93 disappear into thin air, and somehow ensure that the relatives of the passengers collaborated with the deception. It could recruit tens of thousands of conspirators to participate in these great crimes and induce them all to have kept their mouths shut, for ever.

The planting of explosives in the towers didn't attract attention? Never mind the testimony of Scott Forbes who witnessed power downs and an entire floor being shut down and strangers walking around the building with cables, amongst other things.

As for the other points, they are already addressed in my comments that I contributed to the Debunking-BBC article.

In other words, you must believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their pals are all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful, despite the fact that they were incapable of faking either weapons of mass destruction or any evidence at Ground Zero that Saddam Hussein was responsible. You must believe that the impression of cackhandedness and incompetence they have managed to project since taking office is a front. Otherwise you are a traitor and a spy.

Monbiot restates again the old, tired line that conspirators have to be 'all-powerful' to carry out conspiracies. Apparently it's not enough for him that this point was already addressed in his previous hit piece, and addressed over and over again in response to dozens of other propaganda pieces.

Again, the fact that their conspiracy is falling apart and being exposed left and right is testimony to the fact that the Bush cabal is not 'all-seeing and all-powerful', as were neither the Soviets nor the Nazis.

Why do I bother with these morons? Because they are destroying the movements some of us have spent a long time trying to build. Those of us who believe that the crucial global issues - climate change, the Iraq war, nuclear proliferation, inequality - are insufficiently debated in parliament or congress, that corporate power stands too heavily on democracy, that war criminals, cheats and liars are not being held to account, have invested our efforts in movements outside the mainstream political process. These, we are now discovering, are peculiarly susceptible to this epidemic of gibberish.

Have you ever thought about the possibility that you're the one destroying the movement by limiting inquiry about the extent of their crimes and controlling the opposition? You really think that exposing a government, supported by that same corporate elite, that murders almost 3,000 people to justify an imperial agenda, and raising awareness about the fact that governments have been pulling off such tricks since the beginning of times, is less important than climate change and the Iraq war? You really think that the deaths of 3,000 people and their grieving families are unworthy of a true investigation because you would rather focus on vague issues such as 'nuclear proliferation' and 'inequality'?

The obvious corollorary to the belief that the Bush administration is all-powerful is that the rest of us are completely powerless. In fact it seems to me that the purpose of the "9/11 truth movement" is to be powerless. The omnipotence of the Bush regime is the coward's fantasy, an excuse for inaction used by those who don't have the stomach to engage in real political fights.

A group that has been snowballing for the past few years, exposing hundreds of anomalies with the official 9/11 story, composing dozens of documentary films and started hundreds of sites, and gets poll approvals of over a third of Americans and higher in other countries, to the point that you feel the obligation to write two incensed articles filled with personal attacks and (deservedly) get hundreds of vitriolic emails in response, is what you think sees itself as 'powerless'?

Let me give you an example. The column I wrote about Loose Change two weeks ago generated 777 posts on the Guardian Comment is Free website, which is almost a record. Most of them were furious. The response from a producer of the film, published last week, attracted 467. On the same day the Guardian published my article about a genuine, demonstrable conspiracy: a spy network feeding confidential information from an arms control campaign to Britain's biggest weapons manufacturer, BAE Systems. It drew 60 responses. The members of the 9/11 cult weren't interested. If they had been, they might have had to do something. The great virtue of a fake conspiracy is that it calls on you to do nothing.

And I suppose that the thousands of people who have been protesting in New York and London facing police with machine guns is what you call doing nothing?

Poor Monbiot, nobody reads your articles anymore because you won't cover the real issues, so you have to pen hit pieces bashing our investigations and calling us a 'cult' to get attention. Maybe people haven't looked at your story for the simple reasons that the public already knows about corporate espionage, especially Bush and Blair's wiretaps and elsewhere, and about the corruption of arms manufacturers. That particular incident also did not directly result in the deaths of thousands of people, and justified the casualties of millions of people in imperial wars.

The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a displacement activity. A displacement activity is something you do because you feel incapable of doing what you ought to do. A squirrel sees a larger squirrel stealing its horde of nuts. Instead of attacking its rival, it sinks its teeth into a tree and starts ripping it to pieces. Faced with the mountainous challenge of the real issues we must confront, the chickens in the "truth" movement focus instead on a fairytale, knowing that nothing they do or say will count, knowing that because the perpetrators don't exist, they can't fight back. They demonstrate their courage by repeatedly bayoneting a scarecrow.

A laughably hypocritical accusation, given your own whitewash of the 9/11 issue in favour of your other pet issues which are already being discussed at length by establishment academics. Apparently it doesn't occur to you that a government willing to kill 3,000 of its own people might be a far scarier, more urgent and dangerous problem than 'inequality', which has been a problem since the beginning of civilisation.

By the way, false flag operations is one of the tools used by the elite to maintain their positions of power; if we are to combat 'inequality' and the war in Iraq, then it might be a good idea to address some of the root. But you don't really care about that, do you, because you're not the one holding signs and facing armed police officers and putting your credibility and reputation at stake; you hate us because you're more interested in holding on to your cushy job penning establishment-approved articles than finding the truth, and you're complaining because we're taking your spotlight instead of playing along.

Many of those who posted responses on Comment is Free contend that Loose Change (which was neatly demolished in the BBC's film The Conspiracy Files on Sunday night) is a poor representation of the conspiracists' case. They urge us instead to visit websites like 911truth.org, physics911.net and 911scholars.org, and to read articles by the theology professor David Ray Griffin and the physicist Steven E Jones.

Thanks for pointing out to us that BBC demolished Loose Change. Too bad it got exposed as a poorly researched hit piece by three or four articles (including our own) a day after and even before the film went on air. Guy Smith, the producer of the show, had to defend himself on Alex Jones' show and got his ass handed to him.

Concerned that I might have missed something, I have now done all those things, and have come across exactly the same concatenation of ill-attested nonsense as I saw in Loose Change. In all these cases you will find wild supposition raised to the status of incontrovertible fact, rumour and confusion transformed into evidence, selective editing, the citation of fake experts, the dismissal of real ones. Doubtless I will now be told that these are not the true believers: I will need to dive into another vat of tripe to get to the heart of the conspiracy.

Apparently those dozens of professors and government insiders, including the top Bin Laden expert who now publicly states that the Osama confession video was a fake, do not count as 'real' experts. But only the ones supporting your biases towards the 9/11 events, apparently, are 'real' experts.

The 9/11 truthers remind me of nothing so much as the climate change deniers, cherry-picking their evidence, seizing any excuse for ignoring the arguments of their opponents. Witness the respondents to my Loose Change column who maintain that the magazine Popular Mechanics, which has ripped the demolition theories apart, is a government front. They know this because one of its editors, Benjamin Chertoff, is the brother/nephew/first cousin of the US homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff. (They are, as far as Benjamin can discover, unrelated, but what does he know?)

Actually, we don't ignore Popular Mechanics because it's a government front, but because it's been debunked over and over again.

Benjamin may say all he wants that he doesn't believe he's related to Michael Chertoff, but his mother doesn't agree with him.

Like the millenarian fantasies which helped to destroy the Levellers as a political force in the mid-17th century, this crazy distraction presents a mortal danger to popular oppositional movements. If I were Bush or Blair, nothing would please me more than to see my opponents making idiots of themselves, while devoting their lives to chasing a phantom. But as a controlled asset of the new world order, I would say that, wouldn't I? It's all part of the plot.

Whatever the Levellers and the alleged 'millenarian fantasies' were, contrarily to your chicken little scare tactics, it does not look like the 9/11 truth movement is ready to die soon, considering that the numbers of sites debunking the 9/11 official story are growing exponentially and far surpass the number of sites supporting it.

We don't need you to sarcastically admit to being an agent of the New World Order, because not merely your support of the official 9/11 conspiracy theory, but also the sophistic nature of your hit piece, exposes you as a propagandist. But we would say that, wouldn't we, because after all we're just a bunch of 'conspiracy idiots'.

EDIT: it turns out that Monbiot had a rather different opinion of the 9/11 events in 2001:

http://aangirfan.blogspot.com/2007/02/monbiot-and-9-11.html

"The more evidence US intelligence presents...the less credible the story becomes.

"First there was the car. A man had informed the police, we were told, that he'd had a furious argument with some suspicious looking Moslems in the parking lot at Boston airport. He led the investigators to the car, in which they found a copy of the Koran and a flight manual in Arabic (Flight manuals are 'always' in English), showing that these were the fundamentalists who had hijacked the planes.

"Now flying an aeroplane is not one of these things you learn in the back of a car on the way to the airport. Either you know how to do it or you don't.
"Leaving the Koran unattended, a Moslem friend tells me, is considered sinful.

"And if you were about to perpetrate one of the biggest terrorist outrages the world has ever seen, would you draw attention to yourself by arguing over a parking place?

"Then there is the passport. The security services claim that a passport belonging to one of the hijackers was extracted from the rubble of the World Trade Centre. This definitive identification might help them to track the rest of the network.

"We are being asked to believe that a paper document from the cockpit of the first plane - the epicentre of an inferno which vapourised steel - survived the fireball and fell to the ground almost intact."When presented with material like this, I can't help suspecting that intelligence agents have assembled the theory first, then sought the facts required to fit it...

"I think WE MIGHT HAVE SOME CAUSE TO REGARD THE NEW EVIDENCE AGAINST BIN LADEN WITH A MEASURE OF SCEPTICISM."

So this, Monbiot, makes you worse than a New World Order asset or an accessory after the fact, but a coward, a traitor and a collaborator. Like Doug Thompson and Noam Chomsky, you have now lost your credibility and you have deserved it. When the New World Order gets toppled (because unlike you, we are not cowards), you will be held to account for aiding the Bush and Blair regimes.

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