Forwarded with Compliments of Government of the USA in Exile (GUSAE): Free Americans Resisting the Fourth Reich on Behalf of All Species.
Democracy When?
Amy Goodman's Not-So-Good Coverage of 9/11
by Mark Robinowitz
YELLOW Alert: Risk of Fascism is ELEVATED
http://www.oilempire.us/democracynow.html
When Amy Goodman was in Eugene, Oregon on May 8, 2004, I asked her why she thought the liberal alternative media have ignored and censored evidence of Bush's complicity in 9/11. She replied that she had no opinion and asked me for my opinion. I replied that I thought it was a combination of fear and foundation funding controlling certain publications (ie. The Nation). She didn't have a direct response to this, but she said that she was reading David Ray Griffin's book The New Pearl Harbor and promised activists in Seattle that she (finally) would invite him on her show. I informed her that Michael Ruppert's book will be published soon, and her response was "good." Unfortunately, her May 27 interview of Griffin was not-so-good -- perhaps one could use the Newspeak term (from the novel "1984") "double plus ungood" to describe her show's hatchet job masquerading as an interview.
In the fall of 2002, Ms. Goodman spoke in the same room at the University of Oregon during a previous speaking tour. After her speech (which was very similar to her May 2004 speech), I asked her after the event if she would help investigate the recently disclosed story of how the Air Force, CIA, NORAD and National Reconnaissance Office were conducting "war games" similar to 9/11 during the 9/11 "attacks," which were apparently used to confuse the air defense response. She would not reply, and looked at me in apparent fear. It was a particularly strange response considering she had just spoken eloquently about her tremendous courage in reporting on the massacre in East Timor. (The issue of the 9/11 war games on 9/11 has not ever been mentioned on Democracy Now -- and it is likely that if they were, DN would run the risk of losing their foundation funding, which would force them to lay off much of their staff.)
Until May 2004, Democracy Now did not have any guests who dissented from the official story that 9/11 was the result of "incompetence" by the Bush regime, and studiously avoided any discussion of the most basic evidence of official foreknowledge and complicity. This track record was changed with DN's interviews of 9/11 widow Ellen Mariani (who turned down a million-dollar hush-money payment from the federal government in order to file a RICO lawsuit against the Bush regime) and David Ray Griffin, the author of "The New Pearl Harbor."
Mrs. Mariani's activism was described by the show's website as a concern about the "intelligence failure" of the Bush regime. While the full truth of 9/11 will probably never be known, it is already proven beyond reasonable doubt that the kindest interpretation is that the Bush regime knew about 9/11 in advance and deliberately let it happen, just like President Roosevelt knew the Japanese were about to attack Pearl Harbor and chose to allow those attacks to occur in order to galvanize a divided nation to support world war. (FDR did not need to give technical assistance to the Japanese to make sure the attacks succeeded - they were able to find Pearl Harbor on their own. However, the top military echelons kept the Army and Navy commanders in Hawaii "out of the loop" of the intercepted / decrypted Japanese communications that revealed that the "surprise attack" was about to take place, thus ensuring that the "Day of Infamy" would be allowed to take place unhindered.) The only "intelligence failure" of 9/11 was among the American public and media that refuse to connect the dots of the evidence of complicity.
DN's interview of David Ray Griffin was more disturbing than mischaracterizing Ellen Mariani's quest for truth and justice. Griffin appeared on the show after a several-months-long campaign by the National 9/11 Visibility Project (www.911visibility.org) called "Waking Amy," an internet-based effort to encourage DN to put Griffin on their show. When DN finally scheduled Griffin, he was going to be on the show along with Mariani - which would have been a very powerful interview. However, at the last minute, DN separated the two, and put Griffin on the air a few days later.
Griffin was placed on the show along with long-time anti-conspiracist John Foster "Chip" Berlet, whose group Political Research Associates is an alleged left-wing organization that is funded, in part, by the right-wing Ford Foundation. (Why does this "philanthropic" organization with ties to the CIA fund a group that professes leftist politics? Does the Ford Foundation want more social justice and economic equality, or an opposition movement that is less effective?)
Berlet is not an expert on the evidence of 9/11, yet was invited onto DN to appear with Griffin (instead of 9/11 widow Ellen Mariani). Berlet's previous comments on the evidence of official complicity have been primarily ideological objections, his writings show no familiarity with even the most basic evidence that debunks the official "surprise attack" paradigm and the "incompetence" explanation.
The transcript of the Griffin / Berlet show is at http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/26/150221
Griffin started his presentation with the numerous prior warnings of 9/11, the insider trading on United and American in the days before the "attacks," the obstructions of investigations within the FBI, the failure of the Air Force to scramble interceptors in a timely manner, the involvement of Pakistan in funding the alleged hijackers, among other anomalies. Berlet ignored nearly everything in Griffin's book and opening statements, and focused instead on the anomalies that are the least proven, primarily the issue of what did or did not hit the Pentagon. Berlet and Goodman also challenged Griffin on the issue of whether the Twin Towers were brought down in a controlled demolition, but completely ignored the much stronger evidence for the intentional demolition of World Trade Center Building 7, a 47-story steel skyscraper that collapsed late in the day on 9/11 although it was not hit by a plane nor by the collapsing towers.
Berlet even claimed that there wasn't any intentional problem with the Air Force response to the multiple hijackings, arguing that Andrews Air Force Base (about 10 miles from the Pentagon) did not have scramble-ready planes, even though the Andrews website claimed that they did before 9/11. But even if Berlet is right about Andrews, the planes that were eventually scrambled that morning to protect the capital were from the Norfolk, Virginia area, only a little more than 100 miles away (and only a few minutes travel by F-15 and F-16). Berlet threw in some ridiculous comments about how supersonic planes cannot instantly get up to full speed to distract the listeners from thinking about the implications of the Air Force stand-down. Berlet even ignored Griffin's response to Berlet's deconstruction of "The New Pearl Harbor" on Berlet's website, where Griffin noted that "Berlet ignores the fact that I had quoted the US Air Force's own website, according to which an F-15 routinely "goes from 'scramble order' to 29,000 feet in only 2.5 minutes."
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http://www.publiceye.org/conspire/Post911/Griffin1.html
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