January 10 2004

To The Editor, Toronto Star:
RE: Guns in the skies (Jan 2 2003), wherein you say at one point - "...Al Qaeda terrorists seized four U.S. passenger planes and flew them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, killing thousands..."

I wonder if I might inquire how it is you can say this with such apparent certainty - has it somehow escaped your attention that well over two years now since that tragic day, no official investigation has ever been held to confirm this idea, this "conspiracy theory" that a bunch of Arabs led by a guy in a cave in Afghanistan (rich family or not!) managed to circumvent the entire US security system, cause such confusion in the American FAA and military defence command that that great modern American war machine could not respond to an overt attack on its soil for over 2 hours - could not, indeed, get a defensive plane in the air for that time!!!!!!!, and using pilots who were basically drummed out of flight school because they could not handle a Cessna managing to drive huge modern aircraft around like fighter pilots (hahahahah - you just want to laugh at the comic book nature of a plot like that - wow!!! - teen fantasies indeed!) - no indeed, in reality, rather than instigate any sort of investigation into what went wrong that day, and who actually did what to whom, we have seen the American Government, or at least George Bush's part of it, doing everything within its power to prevent or seriously hinder such an investigation, for some odd reason. There have, however, in the intervening period, been many, many questions raised about virtually all parts of this US Government "conspiracy theory", and anyone who looks at these things with an independent eye is quickly struck at how very, very shaky (to be polite) the whole bin Laden-Al Quaeda-cave in Afghanistan story actually is when subjected to such questions (if for some reason you are unaware of such things, drop me a note and I will steer you to a few of the more well done of the hundreds of websites (apparently the only independent journalism being done in the world these days) which explore these issues in detail - doing the job that you ought to be doing but are not).

Given this glaring lack of any kind of investigation into the events surrounding that day, it gets even stranger when we see not only the American media but most of you media people in Canada promoting this fantastical conspiracy theory as gospel, as historical fact and record, when actually all there is concerning the official "record" is a bunch of wild, often hysterical stories issued by the American government in the hours and days following the incident, most of which have subsequently proven either untrue or highly suspect (i.e. of the 19 named "hijackers", at least 6 have been proven to be still alive - but this has never been explained; or the essential impossibility of the Pentagon chapter of the conspiracy theory has never been questioned in the mainstream media (many many questions here alone - for instance, how can an explosion powerful and hot enough to "vaporise" (the "official" explanation for the lack of debris) an airplane the size of the supposed 757 or whatever it was have left traces of the DNA of almost 100 passengers for identification (again the "official" story of passenger ID), even though human flesh and DNA is much, much, MUCH more vaporisable than metal??? - or a HUGE plane leaving such a small hole, or no debris, or there has yet to be a serious attempt at explaining why the American air defence, including a full squadron at Andrews Air Force some 10 miles from the Pentagon itself, was unable to get fighters into the air to protect the American capital for over two hours (for good enough reason - there is no credible explanation outside of a standdown order, which noone, understandably, wants to acknowledge or explain - odd that, for instance, Bill Clinton's disinclination to explain certain embarrassing things didn't stop the news vultures from descending on him....) - I could go on at length) - and yet we have papers like the Star carrying on as if the entire story handed out to the media by the American government - full of holes and with no investigation as it is, and increasingly so as the weeks and months go by - is some kind of historical factual record.

Orwell would have been proud of you all, and probably himself to some extent - the Ministry of Truth is apparently alive and well, creating and rewriting history as we watch.

Looking at things in the broader picture, all of the terrorism stuff we have been subjected to the last couple of years - unfounded stories, hysteria, "orange alerts", security searches, etc and etc - seem designed with only one end in mind - to make people completely terrified of their own shadows - such people are, it is quite well known in psychological circles, very much less able to think rationally - and in the name of this fear give increasingly totalitarian powers to their governments. A government that was truly concerned about violent criminal activities perhaps being directed against their country would, however, be acting VERY much differently than all of this fear-mongering we are seeing.

As an analogy, think of your average horror style move - well, no, let's not sink to Jason or Hallowe'en or Exorcist III depths - but your better class of "fright" flic if you will - something the esteemed Mr. Hitchcock, for instance, excelled at - he would build the suspense through innuendo and loud music, so that noone knew exactly what was going to happen but it was SURELY going to be TERRIBLE!!!! - and then when he said "BOO!!!!" everyone jumped out of their seats, although actually nothing scary had happened at all!!! Great stuff in the movies, or for kids at (the real) Hallowe'en - but in real life, for adult citizens of a democratic society, it is very, very dangerous, and not great at all. Well, I suppose I should quantify that a bit - it's not so great for We The People - it is, of course, pretty great altogether for those who obtained rule by false means, and are intent on maintaining that rule through whatever means necessary and even expanding it, but who understand well that if We The People ever find out what brutal, lying, manipulative criminals they really are, we will surely haul them all off to the gallows posthaste. So the stakes are very high for these people, they have made a huge gamble, and with such high stakes, it is quite understandable that they would feel no compunction about using every measure available to them to win their game.

A mature citizenry, supported and given accurate information by a free popular press, would be saying ENOUGH already with the scare stories and false arrests and childish "color-coded" alerts, and demanding a full and public investigation into all of these allegations, and a full debate upon a rational course of action IF such things turn out to have any factual basis and there actually is some sort of serious, credible, verifiable threat (really, closing down airlines and creating fear and havoc on the Christmas holiday based on bogeyman stories about a little old lady and a schoolboy? A free and rational press would be laughing aloud at such incompetence and fearmongering from elected officials - and then demanding the suspension from their jobs of the people who started this farcical parade, followed by a 3-month psychological evaluation (criminal charges definitely pending), and not forgetting a serious look at the qualifications of the people who hired them in the first place and then got all excited about their "intelligence" - and let us not pretend we are above such dangerous nonsense in Canada - there has been NO fallout that I have heard of concerning the CSIS-RCMP "intelligence" experts who rounded up those 23 Mid-east persons last August with great fanfare about "terrorist" connections, and very shortly thereafter had to let them all go when their complete lack of hard evidence came out - how can a rational country base decisions on ANYTHING these people say in the future???? - that we do and are still, however, would, it seems to me, say a great deal to a rational mind about the actual reasons behind those decisions - much more involved, one might be led to think, with creating an atmosphere of fear in the people of the country rather than actually preventing any "terrorist" attacks - which, you might note, have been noticeably lacking in our country, making one wonder even more at the reasons for the mindless fear and hysteria being promoted.

What one also wonders about is how and why the Canadian media is going along with this - I can understand the "National" Post doing so, as we all know it is nothing more than the "Voice of the NWO Bush government" in Canada, but I must admit I find it a bit difficult to believe an old, honoured paper like the Toronto Star could be complicit in such a plot, given your history of supporting the common people - and yet, on the other hand, the evidence is now quite overwhelming that the US government was at the very least complicit in the 911 terrorist act, with the standdown of the US Air Force the primary smoking gun (heavily smoking at that), and the evidence is now pretty much fully in also that the Bush government lied and lied and lied some more about their reasons for invading Iraq - and yet the Star is seemingly doing its level best to be a propagandist for that Bush government again in this case, doing little or nothing to demand accountability for these international criminals, and, closer to home, demanding that our Canadian government cease its silence on these things, and demand an international investigation into these most serious matters. I am sure you are familiar with the word "accomplice" in matters of criminal law - or the phrase "aid and abet" - if Canada, with this knowledge available, refuses to speak up, then the Court of International Retribution that will surely be established one day to deal with the current criminal regime in Washington may well be looking northward, and using such words. What a sad, sad day for Canadians.

One is reminded of an old schoolboy joke - "Hey! Ya wanna see me run around the world in one second?" "Hahaha you can't do that!" "Sure I can - watch! (kid makes a fast gesture with his head or something) - There I just did it!" - well, Tom Ridge's pronouncements a few days ago about how all the orange and yellow alerts were working because by golly they just know they deterred some awful terrorist attacks are of about the same caliber of credibility, and it just astounds me how supposedly intelligent "journalists" can wander around wide-eyed at this kind of stuff, saying how lucky we are to have such great people protecting us, and passing this great wisdom on to all the people who read their papers. It must be all Ridge and his buds can do to hold in the laughter at the simpletons wearing suits posing as journalists until they get back in a closed room somewhere - you may recall in schooldays again how the bigger and cleverer kids used to love to play jokes that made the smaller weaker kids look a bit foolish, then laugh and laugh at how stupid and credulous they were - same idea here. The problem being, in the schooldays the fooled kids just got a bit red in the face about such things - these days, the Bush people are killing thousands and causing billions in destruction all around the world, and implementing a New World Order that will make Orwell's 1984 look positively benign, whilst the "intrepid media" do nothing about it.

Actually it is much worse than doing nothing - by refusing to call them on it, you in the Star and the others are helping them with their dastardly plan (sorry about the lapse into comic-book jargon - but the whole thing is being conducted on that level - the "dumbing down" of society has evidently reached that stage....)

Wait wait wait I hear you respond - but there ARE real terrorists out there, and they DO have plans to attack - are you just suggesting we sit back and allow them to attack at will??? Not at all - what I am suggesting is that before we get all hysterical, we find out exactly who the "terrorists" are - accusing and convicting the wrong people without even a fair hearing is not the democratic process that I was raised to believe was the proper way of doing things in Canada - and yet with the Star's essentially unquestioning acceptance of the American conspiracy theory that bin Laden and Al Quaeda are "the enemy", attaching the governments of Iraq or North Korea or Syria as desired, with an equal lack of any hearing or presentation of evidence (as noted above, "secret stuff" from their "intelligence" agencies is NOT sufficient!), that is what you are doing. And the world that will come from this, where the "justice system" is composed of such "secret intelligence" and with no need of hearings or trials to prove anything, is not going to be a very safe or democratic place.

I am most disappointed that the Star is apparently unable to understand this, and continues to regale its readers with these unfounded conspiracy theory bogeyman-terrorist tales. Might I suggest a 2004 New Year's Resolution for you all - do the job of a real newspaper and real journalists, and question these stories as they deserve to be questioned - perform the public service that is the mandate of a large modern Canadian daily, and provide your readers and the citizens of Canada with real information, not hysterical "orange alerts" from people whose credibility is very, very shaky indeed, or continuing to refer to unfounded American conspiracy theories as fact.

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