Some Thoughts on the Need to Hold Our Government Accountable

[Time for change]

The following is a letter to the editor that I am sending to The Nation. I recognize that it is almost certainly much too long to be published by them. However, I couldn’t make my points in a shorter letter, and I think that it is important to say these things:

Whereas I very much share Alexander Cockburn’s concern with the lack of political protest in our country today, I nevertheless found “From Flying Saucers to 9/11” to be inappropriate at best and most likely counterproductive. Using words like “nuts”, “cult”, “political infantilism”, “kookery”, “lunatic”, “Flying saucer craze”, and “immune to reality check” to describe people who have a different but well reasoned point of view on the role of our government in the 9/11 attacks on our country, and who are deeply concerned about holding our government accountable for its actions and ensuring a truthful historical record, does not contribute to productive debate. Those are the kind of words that people recently used to describe concerned American citizens who claimed that the 2004 election was stolen, until more widespread information brought the discussion into the mainstream, followed by the publicizing of scientific tests on our voting methods and an intensification of efforts to reform this system which is essential to our democracy.

My first problem with Cockburn’s discussion is his imputing of a cause and effect relationship between the widespread interest of many Americans in evaluating the Bush administration’s role in the 9/11 attacks (sometimes referred to as the 9/11 Truth Movement) and the general lack of adequate political protest against the Bush administration. Besides the fact that Cockburn provides no evidence to establish that purported relationship, it doesn’t even seem plausible. If anything, a widely held belief that the Bush administration was complicit in the attacks would likely lead to substantially greater dissatisfaction with it and consequently more political protest, not less.

Secondly, Cockburn offers little or nothing to back up his opinions about the events of 9/11 and apparently doesn’t have much of an understanding of the relevant issues. Volumes of material have been written providing excellent reasons to seriously question the official version of the 9/11 attacks. David Ray Griffin’s excellent book, “The 9/11 Commission Report – Omissions and Distortions”, provides scores of reasons to seriously suspect government complicity, and just as important, provides solid evidence that the 9/11 Commission’s report on the subject was grossly deficient in numerous respects.

The reasons, such as they are, that Cockburn provides in his article for accepting the official story, are very weak. He gives four reasons for dismissing as kooks those people who question whether a plane actually hit the Pentagon: Pictures of the plane hitting the Pentagon are available; a man claims to have seen the terrified faces of the passengers in the plane; Cockburn knows two people who were on the plane; and, the Bush administration claims to have ID’d dental remains.

I, along with thousands or millions of other people, have seen those pictures of the “plane” hitting the Pentagon, finally released by the Pentagon after several years. I agree that the object in the video might be a plane. But if anyone claims to know that the object is a plane I think that they should explain how they know that. As for the man who saw the terrified faces of passengers, there are also people who claim to have seen or heard a missile. And I have to question whether anyone could see a face, let alone faces, in a plane moving at hundreds of miles per hour. As for Cockburn knowing two people who were on the plane, that has no relevance to the question of whether or not the plane hit the Pentagon. I have never heard anyone claim that Flight 77 didn’t leave Dulles that morning, that it didn’t have passengers on it, or that any of those passengers lived to see September 12th. And as for the Bush administration claiming to have ID’d dental remains of passengers, this is the same administration that claimed proof of WMDs in Iraq, ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, that abolishing the tax on inheritances above 1.5 million dollars will be of benefit to average Americans, that Michael Brown did a heckuva job in responding to Katrina, that “we don’t use torture”, and that George Bush was told by God to invade Iraq.

Lastly, this is a very important issue. If evidence raises serious questions about our government’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks – and I am convinced that it does – then it must be pursued, just as its other serious misdeeds must be pursued. As a nation we need to know as much about this as possible. The more we know about what our government has done the better prepared we are likely to be to protect ourselves against it. Furthermore, if a government is allowed to get away with perpetrating acts such as this, as Hitler did with the Reichstag fire, and as JFK’s assassins did, then future governments will feel all the more empowered to do likewise.

I understand that this is a subject that most Americans are not prepared to face. But it must be faced. It is not a distraction. Investigations of the crimes or possible crimes of government are part and parcel to the maintenance of a democracy.


P.S. – I almost neglected to make my most important point, as it was buried deep within my soul: I believe that the editors of The Nation would agree with me that we are currently in a political battle of monumental importance to reclaim our country from probably the worst government our country has ever experienced. Among the many reasons why I feel this way, probably the most important is the Bush administration’s contempt for international and domestic law and human rights, which has resulted in its indefinite incarceration without charges, and human rights abuses including torture, of hundreds or thousands of people throughout the world.

Sadly, a sizable minority of Americans see nothing wrong with this, and a majority do not seem to be very concerned about it. It is deeply distressing to me to live in a world where such people are so numerous, though I am used to it by now and recognize that we all must make the best of a bad situation. This situation reminds me very much of Martin Niemoller’s famous poem, “First They Came for the Communists”, which too many people are either unfamiliar with or are unable to appreciate. I believe that the central problem is that most Americans , and indeed most people, see themselves as fundamentally different than “others”, rather than as sharing a common humanity with them. Consequently, what happens to “others” is not of direct concern to them. Hence the tendency of many even liberal anti-war Americans to emphasize the deaths of American soldiers while neglecting to do the same for the deaths of many times that number of Iraqis.

My central point is this: One of the main reasons why uncovering the truth of the 9/11 attacks is so important is that (I believe) many millions of people who fail to see the problem with the Bush administration’s contempt for international law and human rights would have much less trouble seeing a problem with the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 attacks if presented with a full and accurate accounting of all the relevant facts. And then perhaps many of them would see the connection between the two.

In other words, few people at this time see the connection between the two. They fail to understand that a government that has repeatedly demonstrated its contempt for human rights with respect to a minority ethnic group would likely be capable of perpetrating atrocities against other Americans as well, if doing so is thought by them to be necessary in order to achieve their ends. This was a central lesson of the Holocaust. How many more Holocausts do we have to have before the world learns that lesson?

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1. K&R

The cons will never learn the lesson of Niemoller's poem because the cons persistently see things in black and white, us and them. The government will never come for "us" (meaning themselves), because they're good, white, god-fearing folk. No, they're after "them", those shady, olive-skinned people who don't speak english. They will never learn the lesson of the slippery slope, because no matter how slippery the slope is, in their minds, it will never effect themselves, and who else do the cons think of other than themselves? And once the government starts coming for the liberals in this country, that's ok too because of the danger that they pose to this country by providing such caustic dissent. We're dealing with people of such cowardice that they would rather piss on the Constitution and Geneva Conventions, destroy our world opinion so we can perform all sorts of inhumane torture on people, guilty or innocent to provide information which is typically more unreliable than not. Just so they can sleep a little bit better at night thinking that they're safer from an act of terrorism that statistically, they'd be about as likely to experience as getting struck by lightning and winning the lottery on the same day.

I used to think it ironic that republicans (especially male republicans) were so prone to such excessive alpha male behavior when in reality, they are far more fearful than the public in general. As you've said before, on the inside, all bullies are actually cowards. Projection is a powerful psychological tool used by the right, I guess so they can hide how selfish and cowardly they truly are. I wish we had an effective way of convincing the public of how scared these people are so that maybe we could shame them out of being republicans. Of course, that would require republicans to have a sense of shame. But still, I think a focused effort on showing how cowardly the right in this country is today would be money well spent in the weeks prior to the election. Someone here on the DU brought up the suggestion of a bumper sticker stating: "I'm not scared enough to vote republican." Sounds good to me. And to think, less than ten years ago, all they had to fear was oral sex and what to say to their children when they asked who Newt Gingrich was and why was he so interested in another man's penis.