| by Paul Craig
Roberts
( December 29,
2012, Washington DC, Sri Lanka Guardian) In the Western world truth no longer
has any meaning. In its place stands agenda.
Agenda is all
important, because it is the way Washington achieves hegemony over the world
and the American people. 9/11 was the “new Pearl Harbor” that the
neoconservatives declared to be necessary for their planned wars against Muslim
countries. For the neoconservatives to go forward with their agenda, it was
necessary for Americans to be connected to the agenda.
President George
W. Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neil, said that prior to 9/11 the
first cabinet meeting was about the need to invade Iraq.
9/11 was
initially blamed on Afghanistan, and the blame was later shifted to Iraq.
Washington’s mobilization against Afghanistan was in place prior to 9/11. The
George W. Bush regime’s invasion of Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom)
occurred on October 7, 2001, less than a month after 9/11. Every military
person knows that it is not possible to have mobilization for invading a
country half way around the world ready in three weeks.
The Orwellian
“PATRIOT Act” is another example of planning prior to the event. This vast
police state measure could not possibly have been written in the short time
between 9/11 and its introduction in Congress. The bill was already written,
sitting on the shelf waiting its opportunity. Why? Who wrote it? Why has there
been no media investigation of the advanced preparation of this police state
legislation?
Evidence that
responses to an event were planned prior to what the government said was a
surprise event does suggest that the event was engineered to drive an agenda
that was already on the books.
Many on the
left-wing are immune to evidence that is contrary to the official 9/11 story,
because for them 9/11 is refreshing blow-back from the oppressed. That the
oppressed struck back is more important to the left-wing than the facts.
The right-wing
can’t let go of the fantasy either. America in all its purity and wonderfulness
was attacked because evil Muslims cannot stand our goodness. “They hate us for
our freedom and democracy.” The right-wing vision of a great and good America
wronged is essential to the right-wing’s sustaining ideology, an ideology that
is prepared to commit violence in order to prove its righteousness.
Implausible
stories can be useful to other agendas and thus be sustained by their use in
other arguments. For example, the Obama regime’s story of the killing of Osama
bin Laden is central to Charles Pierson’s story in the November 16-30, 2012,
CounterPunch in which Pierson writes about the growing strains on the
US-Pakistan alliance. Pierson writes that bin Laden resided next to Pakistan’s
largest military academy and that bin Laden “did go next door every Wednesday
to use the pool. If the Pakistani government was unaware of bin Laden’s
presence this would mark an intelligence failure of heroic proportions.”
Is it plausible
that Osama bin Laden, a hunted man (actually a man dead for a decade), visited
the Pakistani army, a bought-and-paid-for entity used by Washington to launch
attacks on Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal areas, to go swimming every Wednesday?
Or is this a
fairy tale made possible by ignoring the live interviews of the neighbors of
the alleged “bin Laden compound.” According to Pakistanis who knew the person
living in “bin Laden’s compound,” the person Americans were told was bin Laden
was a long-time friend who imported foreign delicacies. An eye witness to the
“assault” on “bin Laden’s compound” reported that when the helicopter lifted
off it exploded and there were no survivors. If there were no survivors, there
was no sea burial of bin Laden.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/pakistan-tv-report-contradicts-us-claim-of-bin-laden-s-death/25915
How is it that
the US media can produce a story as fact that is contradicted by the news on
the ground? Is the answer that the bin Laden assassination story served an
agenda by providing evidence that we were winning?
Consider the
Sandy Hook school shooting. This shooting serves as an excuse for
“progressives” to express their hatred of guns and the NRA and to advance their
gun control agenda. Few if any of those hyperventilating over the tragedy know
any of the parents of the murdered children. They have shown no similar
response to the US government’s murder of countless thousands of Muslim
children. The Clinton regime alone killed 500,000 Iraqi children with illegal
sanctions, and Clinton’s immoral secretary of state, a feminist hero, said that
she thought the sanctions were worth the cost of one half million dead Iraqi
children.
Suddenly, 20 US
children become of massive importance to “progressives.” Why? Because the
deaths foster their agenda–gun control in the US.
When I hear
people talk about “gun violence,” I wonder what has happened to language. A gun
is an inanimate object. An inanimate object cannot cause violence. Humans cause
violence. The relevant question is: why do humans cause violence? This obvious
question seldom gets asked. Instead, inanimate objects are blamed for the
actions of humans.
In one of its
reports on the Sandy Hook shooting, Time noted that such events “inevitably
reopen debates about gun control, or more tenuously lead people to complain
about American culture itself. Yet on the very same day, a 36-year-old Chinese
man attacked 22 children with a knife at a primary school in China, suggesting
that there is a critical factor with mass homicides that gets far less
attention.” That factor, “the core of these events,” is mental health and “our
failure to address it as a society.”
http://ideas.time.com/2012/12/15/sandy-hook-shooting-why-did-lanza-target-a-school/?iid=obnetwork
That factor
remains unaddressed, because the agenda-driven media is determined to use the
Sandy Hook shootings as a means of achieving gun control. One wonders if there
is a “knife control” agenda in China. What follows is not an argument that the
report of the Sandy Hook shootings is a hoax. What follows is an argument that
suspicions are created when agenda takes precedence over reporting and
discrepancies in reports are left unresolved.
Agenda-driven
news is the reason that apparent inconsistencies in the Sandy Hook story were
not investigated or explained. According to some reports, the medical examiner
said the children were shot with a rifle, but other reports say the accused was
found dead inside the school with two pistols and that a rifle was found
outside in the car. The police capture a man in the woods who says “I didn’t do
it.” How would a person in the woods know what has just happened? Who was the
man? Was he investigated and released? Will we ever know?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovspEgeMXb4
Some reports say
the school was locked and admission is via security camera and being buzzed in.
Why would a heavily armed person be buzzed in? Other reports say he shot his
way in. Why wouldn’t such a commotion have alerted the school?
Another puzzle
is the video of a father whose child has supposedly been shot to pieces. Prior
to the interview he is caught on camera laughing and joking, and then, like an
actor, he pulls his face and voice into a presentation of grief for the
interview. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urrRcgB581w and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMINqFGNr-w
The spokesman
for the Connecticut State Police is anxious to control the story, warns social
media against posting information contrary to official information, but
provides little information, refusing to answer most questions. The usual
“ongoing investigation” is invoked, but Lanza has already been declared to be
the killer and the number of dead reported. About the only hard information
that emerges is that the police are investigating where every component of the
weapons was manufactured. The relevance to the shooting of where the components
of the weapons were manufactured is not explained. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/people-spreading-misinformation-sandy-hook-massacre-face-charges-police-article-1.1221554
The medical
examiner’s press conference is weird. He is incoherent, unsure of what he is
supposed to say, hasn’t answers to questions he should have, and defers to
police.
Perhaps the best
way to avoid fueling suspicion is for public officials not to hold press
conferences until they are prepared to answer the relevant questions.
And where are
the bodies? Like the alleged murder of Osama bin Laden by a SEAL, the crucial
evidence is not provided. Paul Vance, the Connecticut State Police spokesman,
said that the “victims’ bodies were removed from the school overnight” and that
detectives “were able to positively identify all of the victims and make some
formal notification to all of the families of the victims.”
http://www.kens5.com/news/Sandy-Hook-victims-identified-bodies-removed-from-school-overnight-183647091.html?ref=next
Allegedly, no
parent wanted to see the body of their dead child, but how do you know it is
your child if you do not see the body? It is a strange kind of closure when it
is provided to parents by impersonal detectives. Has anyone seen a body other
than a state medical examiner and a few detectives? Where are the media’s films
of body bags being carried out of the school? Why would Obama’s gun control
agenda forego the propaganda of a procession of body bags being carried out of
a school?
Perhaps the
sensitivity issue prevailed, but with all the suspicion that already exists about
the government and its claims, why fuel the suspicion by withholding visual
evidence of the tragedy?
There are
reports that when emergency medical help arrived at the school, the medical
personnel were denied access to the children on the grounds that there were no
survivors and the scene was too gruesome. Yet, there is a conflicting story
that one six-year old girl had the presence of mind to play dead and walked out
of her classroom unscathed. If the story is true, how do we know that other
survivors did not bleed to death from wounds because the emergency medical
personnel were denied access? Did police exercise more control over the scene
than was warranted?
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/united-states/121216/sandy-hook-shooting-girl-6-was-sole-survivor-her
It doesn’t seem
to matter that questions are not answered and discrepancies are not resolved.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-sandy-hook-school-massacre-unanswered-questions-and-missing-information/5316776
The story is useful to the gun control agenda. Progressives, in order to
achieve their agenda, are willing adjuncts of the police state. The facts of
the shooting are less important than the use of the incident to achieve their
agenda.
Probably there
are answers to the questions. Moreover, the news reports that are the basis for
questions could be incorrect. But why aren’t the answers provided and
confusions cleared up? Instead, people who ask obvious questions are dismissed
as “insensitive to the tragedy” or as “conspiracy kooks.” This in itself
deepens suspicion.
The Colorado
movie theater shooting has its own unresolved discrepancies. One eyewitness
claimed that there were two shooters. Apparently, the suspect was captured
sitting in a car in the theater parking lot, which seems strange. There are
claims that the accused, a graduate student in neuroscience, was involved with
the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency in mind control research and that
he doesn’t remember doing the shooting.
Do we actually
know? Apparently not. Wouldn’t it be preferable to investigate these claims
rather than to leave them as unanswered sources of suspicion? The loose ends of
the Colorado movie shooting contribute to the suspicions caused by news reports
of the Sandy Hook shootings.
A shooting
incident occurs. The government puts out a story. Agendas form and take the
place of the story. Unresolved issues disappear in heated dispute over agendas.
Gun control advocates blame guns, and Second Amendment defenders blame other
factors.
When the media
permit agenda to take precedence over news, people lose confidence in the media
and distrust spreads deeper into society. If the media and the government are
opposed to conspiracy theories, they should not foster the theories by
mishandling the news.
Neither the
right-wing nor the left-wing has an interest in getting to the bottom of
things. The right-wing is aligned with the police state in order to make us
safe from “terrorism”– Muslim terrorism, not the terrorism of the unaccountable
police state.
The American
left is so feeble that it essentially doesn’t exist. Its issues are gun
control, homosexual marriage, abortion, and taxing “the rich.” Such misfocus
cannot slow the onrushing militarized police state. American liberals have such
an abiding faith in government that they are incapable of believing that
beloved government would be culpable in crimes–unless, of course, it was Ronald
Reagan’s government.
As tyranny
envelops the land, the main goal of the left-wing is to disarm the population.
The American
left is the enabler of the police state, and the American right is its
progenitor.
Americans began
their descent into deception and tyranny in the final years of the 20th century
with the Clinton regime’s aggression against Serbia and murderous sanctions on
Iraq. These war crimes were portrayed by the US media and foreign policy
community as great achievements of Western democracy and humanitarianism.
In the first
decade of the 21st century Americans lost their constitutional protections and
had their pocketbooks opened to indefinite wars. The latest report is that
Washington is sending US troops into 35 African countries.
http://rt.com/usa/news/us-deploying-troops-order-749/print/
Worse is to
come.
Paul Craig
Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and
associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business
Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many
university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide
following.
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