Shame On Jesse Ventura! ... The former Minnesota governor has discredited himself, and dishonored and defamed his country by promoting the mistaken view that our government was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. Jesse Ventura should be ashamed of himself and embarrassed. The former Minnesota governor recently lent his political credentials to the discredited 9/11 "Truther" movement by alleging that the Sept. 11 attacks were either planned or permitted by the United States government. This recent admission was only a small part of Ventura's new book, "American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies and More Lies the Government Tells Us," which echoes a revisionist account of American history that holds the Bush administration responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks by implying that the Bush administration either knew about the attacks, did nothing to stop them or actually participated in them. During a March 10 interview with Barbara Walters on "The View," Ventura implied the Bush/Cheney administration used 9/11 as a pretense to start the Iraq War under false pretenses. Ventura apparently developed this theory after former Kennedy/Johnson adviser Robert McNamara visited him at Harvard and allegedly admitted to him that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which escalated the Vietnam War, never actually happened. Perhaps what Ventura is missing is that there is probably more incontrovertible evidence and more witnesses who have already established what happened on Sept. 11, 2001 than most major historical events. To dispute the conventional historical account is intellectually dishonest and nonsensical. – FOX News
Dominant Social Theme: Questions about 9/11 are "beyond the pale."
Free-Market Analysis: The news in this article, excerpted above, has hit the US blogosphere hard. Throughout Friday, there were more and more comments like an inflowing tide – as could be seen if one did a little bit of research on Google. What was it in the article that caused such a ruckus? About midway through the article, the author Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, writes the following:
Shortly before the building [WTC 7] collapsed, several NYPD officers and Con-Edison workers told me that Larry Silverstein, the property developer of One World Financial Center was on the phone with his insurance carrier to see if they would authorize the controlled demolition of the building – since its foundation was already unstable and expected to fall.
This is a surprising assertion since as many have already pointed out, it can take weeks to wire a building for demolition. Thus, the blogosphere speculated, either the building was already wired or Larry Silverstein was thinking about wiring it in the future. Perhaps Silverstein himself will come forward to comment on Shapiro's statement and clear the matter up. Even a simple denial might help, but Silverstein might be reluctant to say anymore on the matter because in the past statements of his have only further complicated an already confused narrative – especially an interview he gave early in the decade about the building's fate.
A website "WhatReallyHappened.com" has a considerable explanation devoted to comments Silverstein made as follows for a television documentary: "I said, you know, we've had such terrible loss of life. Maybe the smartest thing to do is to pull it." The narrative continues as follows:
"On September 9, 2005, Mr. Dara McQuillan, a spokesman for Silverstein Properties, issued the following statement [on the issue of Larry Silverstein's "pull it" comment]: Seven World Trade Center collapsed at 5:20 p.m. on September 11, 2001, after burning for seven hours. There were no casualties, thanks to the heroism of the Fire Department and the work of Silverstein Properties employees who evacuated tenants from the building. ... Later in the day, the Fire Commander ordered his firefighters out of the building and at 5:20 p.m. the building collapsed. No lives were lost at Seven World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Mr. McQuillan has stated that by "it," Mr. Silverstein meant the contingent of firefighters remaining in the building. [US Department of State]
This statement seemingly put the matter to rest. But now Shapiro, passionately disappointed with Jesse Ventura's suspicions over 9/11, has opened the issue all over again, presumably inadvertently. The admission comes on the heels (relatively speaking anyway) of fairly incendiary statements in a book by the former Attorney General for the State of New Jersey and former senior counsel for the 9/11 Commission, John Farmer, who is also, his biography notes, FEMA certified. Farmer writes bluntly in his foreword: "At some level of the government, at some point in time, this book concludes there was a decision not to tell the truth about what happened."
Pretty strong stuff as a broad gamut of government agents testified before the commission, including FBI and CIA agents along with Bush administration, military and Pentagon personnel. But reportedly other 9/11 commissioners share Farmer's point of view and some were so incensed during the hearings that criminal charges were apparently pondered.
9/11 is a central, even mythic issue, for America. It has launched at least two wars in the Middle East and caused a wholesale change in the way Americans relate to their government. While civil liberties have been prized in the US, post 9/11 many civil liberties were disregarded because of the perceived threat of additional terrorism. There is almost unlimited wiretapping in the US these days along with aggressive intelligence operations aimed at tracking US terrorism. The entire texture of freedoms in America – and Britain and Europe as well – has been changed by 9/11.
While the Patriot Act and other abrogations of traditional American liberties can perhaps be justified on domestic security grounds, the lack of clarity about what really happened during 9/11 cries out for additional clarification. There is no need to accuse the US government or its penumbras (including Israel) of complicity in the killing of 3,000 American citizens. (Why would they?) But what should be seen as necessary is a truly independent "commission" of concerned Americans who would gather ALL the relevant evidence available about 9/11 in order to come up with a narrative that is less conflicted and does away with the increasing confusions so amply noted in the blogosphere and throughout the 'Net.
In our estimation, leaders owe it to Americans to perform a truly patriotic act by re-investigating 9/11 and getting to the heart of what went on in a dispassionate and logical way. Up to one third of all Americans (and maybe it is more now) apparently don't believe the official 9/11 story – nor does the Commission's lead attorney. In fact, a recent Pew poll revealed that up to 80 percent of Americans don't trust their government. These numbers have never existed in America before. Something is not right.
Conclusion: Imagine the relief and approval that a new investigation of 9/11 would generate. It would likely convince Americans – who ache to believe in their government at all levels – that the largest and most powerful government on the planet, the American federal government with all its attendant security agencies and military appurtenances, was dedicated to an aggressive level of honesty about one of the country's most important and controversial issues. Surely Americans and their federal government deserve no less.
