Agenda Prevails over Truth
by Paul Craig Roberts
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.
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
