9/11, Twenty-Two Years On
One needs to re-assess the terrorist attacks on New York’s iconic Twin Towers and the Pentagon in the light of two subsequent events. The first is the almost never-ending “war on terror”, the unseemly and ultimately unsuccessful prosecution of related on-the-ground wars and the creation of a deeper-than-ever state, all of which followed seamlessly from the 11 September attacks. The second is Covid.
For, just as Covid, most likely the invention of American funders and Chinese “scientists” working in tandem, led to the Covid State, to the lockdowns, to police overreach, to the death of democracy, and to the enforced medication of whole populations with lethal drugs, 9/11 led to the Terror State. Just as Covid was invented for the vaccines, 9/11 was invented for the war on terror. Bush, Blair and (yes) Howard were the useful idiots in that particular escapade. Though, one suspects, Blair was a little more.
One doesn’t need to be of the “truth movement” to reach these conclusions. As always, it is a matter of simple research, joining obvious dots and using the foundational principles and methods of political science. And no, judging the outcomes (the Terror State and the Covid State) to be caused by the preceding events (9/11 and the Covid virus) is not succumbing to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. ("Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X."). The evidence appears highly plausible, even compelling, that the consequences didn’t just “come after” the causes. It includes eye witness accounts of the sights, sounds and smells of the falling twin towers and the notorious “Building Seven”, as well as some decidedly dodgy events at the Pentagon.
https://off-guardian.org/2023/09/11/9-11-twenty-two-years-on/
In examining the proximate causes of war, the late Graeme MacQueen (a leftie, peacenik, so-called conspiracy theorist from Canada) drew a very valuable distinction between “managed” and “manufactured” war triggers and mere “events” that had consequences. Governments have been in the grubby, (necessarily) secretive business of engineering events for their own purposes since Moses was a boy. They are quite capable of manoeuvring other actors into behaving in certain ways thus enabling such governments to then respond in the ways they had planned to all along. The existence of so-called “nudge units” across the Western democracies confirms this modus operandi. In the case of nudging, it was the State’s own citizens that it was seeking to guide and control. In the case of Pearl Harbour, it was the Japanese. Statecraft is now, just as it has always been, about manipulation. Of both people and of events. Call it steering events.
MacQueen, unsurprisingly, focuses on Pearl Harbour and the almost immediate entry by the USA into World War Two as one of his prime case studies. Another case of cause and effect. (On Pearl Harbour, another so-called conspiracy theorist, Feargus O’Connor Greenwood, has weighed in in his 2020 book, 180 Degrees).
In the case of 9/11, the then US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, demanded legislation for the Patriot Act and the rest of it by “week’s end”. As Karen Greenberg has noted:
… the Patriot Act, submitted in its final version by Ashcroft, and passed by Congress in late October 2001, institutionalized the internalization of war by law enforcement. The new counterterrorism law codified a rights-reducing trend in the name of the war on terror. Riding on the coattails of the anger and fear that had been unleashed in the wake of 9/11, it embraced expanded powers for law enforcement.
https://www.acslaw.org/expertforum/justice-in-america-the-war-on-terrors-damaging-legacy/
Just as was the case with Pearl Harbour (and Covid), all bets were off. The State got what it wanted in both cases, within days, with almost zero dissent, even mild questioning, and democracy was crushed as a result (whatever the merits and de-merits of America’s entry into World War Two
https://rumble.com/v3fi13v-redacted-presents-peace-war-and-911.html
The image of managed and manufactured triggers is a little like the Covid-related notion of “convergent opportunism” first proposed, then abandoned, by Mike Yeadon to explain the behaviour of various malign actors following the release of the virus in Wuhan. Only McQueen’s idea suggests much greater knowledge and pro-active strategy on the part of the State than Yeadon’s.
With the Covid State and “pandemic preparedness”, the ever-expanding rule-by-surveillance simply rolls on. Just this week, the G20 agreed to progress global digital identity and digital currencies.
“Ze cabinets” seem to have been well and truly penetrated. This is real. It is happening. As we speak.
Just as we are limbering up for the Covid 2024 presidential election. With fresh talk of mask mandates and a giant new push for another round of now-known-to-be-lethal State injectables.
It is no accident (as they say) that the battle against the Covid virus was often couched in terms of a “war”. The vaccine rollout was even directed by the military. It is easier to get compliance if there is a war on. Most of the threats to citizen rights have occurred during war-time. All of the Covid theatre, all of the bullshit associated with it, was reminiscent of the late 1990s film, Wag the Dog. Here we had a pretend war directed by an old Hollywood hand to get a president impaled on a sex scandal through an election campaign. Note also Greenberg’s reference to ever expanding law enforcement. Rubber bullets in the back, grannies’ heads smashing into pavements, the arrest of pregnant mothers, all in Daniel Andrews’ Victoria and executed with seeming relish by his military police. The Royal Commission into Victoria Police’s behaviour in relation to the death of Ned Kelly yielded over 200 sackings. But after Covid? Nothing to see here.
Of course, the war on terror and the Covid State built on biowarfare have their linkages. Paula Jardine at TCW has detailed, graphically and compellingly, the direct links from the Terror State to the Covid State.
Before and after 9/11 and the ‘Amerithrax’ anthrax attacks, US officials scaremongered and exaggerated the threat of biological agents to justify the continuation of what they called science-based threat assessment programmes and to secure additional government funding for them.
Adding to Jardine’s analysis is John Whitehead’s chapter-and-verse shopping list of violations of our rights and freedoms – especially the rights and freedoms of Americans, but it has caught on right across the West – since 9/11. There has been a continuous rolling juggernaut of totalitarian, Constitution-busting measures ever since the Patriot Act. 9/11 was the trigger.
As Whitehead suggests, it has been “death by a thousand cuts”.
In the 22 years since the USA Patriot Act—a massive 342-page wish list of expanded powers for the FBI and CIA—was rammed through Congress in the wake of the so-called 9/11 terror attacks, it has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.
… The Patriot Act also redefined terrorism so broadly that many non-terrorist political activities such as protest marches, demonstrations and civil disobedience are now considered potential terrorist acts, thereby rendering anyone desiring to engage in protected First Amendment expressive activities as suspects of the surveillance state.
The Patriot Act justified broader domestic surveillance, the logic being that if government agents knew more about each American, they could distinguish the terrorists from law-abiding citizens—no doubt a reflexive impulse shared by small-town police and federal agents alike.
This, according to Washington Post reporter Robert O’Harrow, Jr., was a fantasy that “had been brewing in the law enforcement world for a long time.” And 9/11 provided the government with the perfect excuse for conducting far-reaching surveillance and collecting mountains of information on even the most law-abiding citizen.
The repeat pattern is that the State engineers outcomes that allow it to introduce new powers that it didn’t have before, that enable it to control the lives of its subjects. We long ago ceased to be citizens, actors in a system of rights and political obligations. There is nothing remotely controversial about asserting this. It is, as I said, Pol Sci 101. Never let a crisis go to waste? Better still, engineer the crisis.
Having manoeuvred the trigger into place, the aspiring totalitarian regime then needs the population on side. This generally turns out to be easier than the State might have assumed. See under Pearl Harbour, 9/11 and (of course) Covid.
And as a number of observers have pointed out, people prefer security over rights, safety over freedom, being looked after over being responsible for one’s actions. This is Psychology 101. Mattias Desmet is one who has linked fear and the sacrifice of our freedoms.
https://geoffjward.medium.com/fear-and-the-sacrifice-of-our-freedoms-a3354f37ceb2
Ivor Cummins has noted that the second greatest human fear (after death, not public speaking as per Jerry Seinfeld) is fear of social exclusion. This explains a lot about popular reactions to Covid rules, and is not too far away from Desmet’s analysis. Or, for that matter, from the Asch conformity experiments.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html
It is perhaps ironic that it was the architect of America’s entry into World War Two who said (some time earlier) that “there is nothing to fear but fear itself”. George Orwell might beg to differ.
The head of Britain’s “nudge unit”, David Halpern, said only this past July that Britons will be “drilled to comply” with future lockdowns. From the mouth of the man himself.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/06/britain-drilled-to-accept-lockdown-in-future-pandemics/
Gary Sidley and Julius Ruechel have discussed both the coming dystopia and what can be done to push back against it. Gary Sidley notes:
Imagine living in a world devoid of individual freedoms and basic human rights, where each person’s behaviour, speech and (even) thoughts are determined by the state. A world characterised by ubiquitous surveillance and ensuing censorship of any action or utterance that deviates from the regime’s version of the ‘greater good’, where martial law can be imposed at the whim of unelected bureaucrats under the pretence of keeping us all ‘safe’. Visualise a cashless society where your debit card habitually pings, and is rejected, because you have exceeded this month’s permitted spend on alcohol, meat, fuel, or travel; (but don’t worry, if you act in a ‘socially responsible’ way your bit of plastic may be re-activated in due course). Picture our towns and cities devoid of small-to-medium sized businesses, with no pubs, restaurants, or other leisure facilities where the proletariat might mingle; an atomised existence, bereft of human interaction, where our world leaders can control us via a combination of media propaganda and the latest mandated Big Pharma concoction.
A nightmarish prospect, undoubtedly, but one that – with the accelerating authoritarianism witnessed since the onset of the Covid era – is becoming ever more likely. The world-government fanatics are in control and their intentions are clear. Consider the ‘action-orientated aspirations’ of the United Nations as they prepare for their 2024 summit, salivating while they dream of ‘multilateral solutions for a better tomorrow’ and ‘strengthening global governance for both present and future generations’.
https://www.coronababble.com/post/how-do-we-halt-the-march-of-health-climate-fascism
Ruechel, author of the 2021 book Autopsy of a Pandemic, weighs in on the trajectory of totalitarian rule that confronts us, and on push-back:
Those in charge have long since signalled that they have no intention of returning to a liberal democracy founded on the recognition of inalienable individual rights and freedoms. If data were the ingredient required to confront them, they would have folded long ago. They are impervious to data. This isn't about a virus. This is a psychological game and it's all about power and control.
In this Brave New World, the regime will grant temporary conditional privileges tied to virus seasonality, good behaviour, or whatever other conditions they choose to set to achieve the social engineering agenda of the day. Once they opened Pandora's Box to a society based on conditional rights, there is no limit to where their imaginations will take them.
How do we stop this neo-feudal re-imagining of society? How do we play chicken with a regime that appears to hold all the cards? At this point it is clear that regaining our freedom depends entirely on the government losing the support of the crowd. To use the words of Hans Christian Andersen's timeless folktale from 1837, we need to shake our frightened fellow citizens out of their stupor by getting them to see that "the emperor has no clothes" but, more importantly, we need everyone who sees it to be willing to say it out loud.
https://www.juliusruechel.com/2021/07/the-emperor-has-no-clothes-finding.html
How do totalitarian states and so-called democratic ones get away with it? Ruechel states:
A frightened mind seeks certainty because certainty feels safe, which is why a frightened mind rejects anything that undermines the feeling of certainty. Uncertainty is scary. This desire for certainty makes people savagely hostile to conflicting data and capable of entertaining the wildest of logical fallacies.
The answer, for both Sidley and Ruechel, is not data-driven rational argument (at least, not initially) but persistent, loud voices in the public square. This isn’t easy, they acknowledge. It isn’t easy both because (as we know and as all the recent evidence suggests), people value safety over freedom. But not only this. The State is always able to find an enemy – just as Orwell’s Big Brother did – to incite hatred and bring the people along. So, it was, respectively, the Japanese, the Russians (this still works), Osama Bin Laden and “the virus”. (You might also throw in fossil fuels). And invoke “war”, whether the faux battle is actually a war. Or not, in the case of “terror” and the virus. And push back isn’t easy because, absurdly, many people – perhaps a majority – still believe that government is benign. As Albert Camus noted, “The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.” And the alibi is routinely believed. Finally, push back isn’t easy because of the power of the twin tools of propaganda and censorship.
Surely democratic governments would not do something as evil as detonating explosions in skyscrapers that had been hit by aeroplanes? Well, we have just seen these same governments locking up whole populations for no reason and then letting them have their freedom back by forcibly injecting experimental drugs into the same people. And they are still doing it. They are continuing each day they deny, refuse to admit or apologise for what they did, and silence dissent, with the greatest cover-up in history.
Actions that put Pearl Harbour and 9/11, massive deceptions as those events allegedly were, well and truly in the shade. Nevertheless, it would be wise to recall (this week) the events of that clear New York September morning, the lives lost, and most importantly, the direct consequences for us all. The world did change. We got the Terror State. Then we got the Biosecurity State. And an utterly dystopian future.
In a sense, it doesn’t really matter whether you believe Graeme MacQueen’s narrative or the theories propounded by Off Guardian and others. The outcome, unless we start pretty soon to push back in the ways suggested by Sidley and Ruechel (publicly, persistently, loudly and in numbers), will be the same, whatever governments might or might not have done to engineer the events that have enabled them to create our totalitarian future.
What is next?
Well, David Rockefeller’s list of crises that could trigger a new world order, put together in the 1950s under the Rockefellers’ Special Brothers Fund, were terrorism, pandemics, financial disasters and … climate! There is enough there to be going on with. We have had one of each since 9/11. Remember that global problems require global solutions, as they say (often). And, often, war.
The Brothers Fund’s purpose?
Advancing social change for a more just, sustainable and peaceful world.
https://www.rbf.org/
Well, they would say that. The new world order always sounds cool.
John and Nisha Whitehead at Off Guardian write:
First came 9/11, which the government used to transform itself into a police state. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which the police state used to test out its lockdown powers.
In light of the government’s tendency to exploit crises (legitimate or manufactured) and capitalize on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state, one has to wonder what so-called crisis it will declare next.
It’s a simple enough formula: first, you create fear, then you capitalize on it by seizing power.
One definition of a conspiracy theory is something that the average man or woman in the street simply cannot afford to believe, since believing it would destroy their faith in everything. Believing that governments are benign and act honestly, openly and consistently in our interests and not in theirs is foundational. To question this is simply not on. So, when confronted by evidence that suggests their faith is based on wobbly (at best) assumptions, they dismiss the message and abuse the messenger. So, when it is suggested that globalism is a plot, that Covid was a scam, that 9/11 and Pearl Harbour were (at best) augmented, even engineered acts of pre-emptive war by the USA, the default position is disbelief and outrage.
The devil convinced us that he didn’t exist (said Baudelaire and the fictional Keyser Soze). The conspiracy crusher, fact-checker class is on a similar mission. So, in memory of 9/11, twenty-two years on, we remember and honour the dead. We celebrate the deeds of the emergency services teams. But we lament the war on terror that ensued in its wake. And, in the light of what we have experienced and learned during the Covid plandemic, we now reserve, indeed demand, the right to question seriously official State narratives about all sorts of events that delivered to governments, on a plate, the opportunity to expand their powers, absent any opposition. Such was the sense of fear and crisis falsely created in both cases. By them, of course.
Paul Collits
19 September 2023
“Imagine living in a world devoid of individual freedoms and basic human rights, where each person’s behaviour, speech and (even) thoughts are determined by the state.”
Before coming to Australia I lived in these sort of places and it’s not fun or pretty.
Heaven help us.
Amr
The "Architect of the US entry into WW2" was Admiral Yamamoto.