9/11 – Pearl Harbor
Often times, the comparison of 9/11 is made to Pearl Harbor. CBS even reported that before going to bed on 9/11, President Bush wrote in his diary: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.” Henry Kissinger, on 9/11, wrote an online article which said: “The government should be charged with a systematic response that, one hopes, will end the way that the attack on Pearl Harbor ended--with the destruction of the system that is responsible for it.” An article in Time magazine appeared right after the attacks which stated: “For once, let’s have no fatuous rhetoric about ‘healing’… A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let’s have rage. What’s needed is a unified, unifying Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury.” A prediction made in September 2000 by the soon-to-be top officials in the Bush regime stated: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor."
Media
On the 1st anniversery of the attacks, the New York Times wrote: “One year later, the public knows less about the circumstances of 2,801 deaths at the foot of Manhattan in broad daylight than people in 1912 knew within weeks about the Titanic.” That was in part the case because the Bush regime argued that an investigation would be a distraction from the “war on terrorism”, so they resisted the call for a special investigation. On Sept. 11, 2003 a writer for the Philadelphia Daily News asked: “why after 730 days do we know so little about what really happened that day?”
The mass media has not provided the public with any comprehensive overviews that lay out all the disturbing questions of which they are aware, that’s one of the major problems. However, there is the internationally known, award winning journalist Greg Palast and Canada’s award-winning Barrie Zwicker who have written comprehensive pieces on 9/11 [if you’re interested]. But the mainstream media has still failed to do it’s job with regard to 9/11, even though, if the official account of 9/11 were to be found false, the consequences would be enormous—much more so than ever before in American history. An example of this misconduct can be summarized in the words of Rena Golden, the executive vice-president and general manager of CNN International. She stated, “Anyone who claims the US media didn’t censor itself is kidding you. And this isn’t just a CNN issue—every journalist who was in any way involved in 9/11 is partly responsible.” As to why this is the case, the CBS anchorman Dan Rather stated: “There was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around people’s necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions.” His quote can at least partly explain why the the mass media has failed to question the official account, especially since journalists perceived as unpatriotic are in danger of losing their job.
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