Goodbye, Mr Roberts

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

jtabeb--I may be reading too much into what he's saying, but he seems to be implying that UBL did not cause the attacks of 9/11 or that the government played a deliberate role in making them or allowing them to happen. If this is what he is implying, then yes, he loses credibility.

Dang -- now we've got another Red Team vs. Blue Team to divide us. Mr. Roberts had many good comments, but if he so much as mention doubts of the official 9/11 story, it causes Glenn Beck like spasms of outrage. 9/11 has become yet another third rail.

I suspected the same implications in what he wrote as you Ghent12, but that increased Mr. Roberts credibility for me.

Those who find such implications grounds for immediate loss of credibility

He had me until this:

America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory.

Credibility shredded.

themselves lose credibility with me.

There are serious and substantial questions as to what happened on 9/11.

Mr. Roberts is dead on here. Those who dismiss outright and entirely, for that reason and no other, the credibility of an otherwise reasonable commentator simply because they express doubts of the government's 9/11 official story conspiracy theory are helping to seal Amerca's fate, perhaps even the world's fate, given the powerful influence of America.

This has become a serious problem for genuine and productive discourse on the issues facing us. Anyone doubting the official 9/11 story is immediately and entirely discredited by many on all that they might say. It's yet another example of successfully controlling the public dialogue and destroying healthy discourse.

[audrey_girl]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

Nice find Audrey girl. Remember the Maine!

and the Lusitania:

fyi:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Lusitania

[grapejelly]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

I think the government's conspiracy theory was what resulted in the attack on Iraq, the foaming at the mouth on Afghanistan and Bin Laden, and the constant war mongering against Iran.

He is 100% right of course.

[skyson]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

Dang -- now we've got another Red Team vs. Blue Team to divide us. Mr. Roberts had many good comments, but if he so much as mention doubts of the official 9/11 story, it causes Glenn Beck like spasms of outrage. 9/11 has become yet another third rail.

I suspected the same implications in what he wrote as you Ghent12, but that increased Mr. Roberts credibility for me.

Those who find such implications grounds for immediate loss of credibility themselves lose credibility with me.

There are serious and substantial questions as to what happened on 9/11.

Mr. Roberts is dead on here. Those who dismiss outright and entirely, for that reason and no other, the credibility of an otherwise reasonable commentator simply because they express doubts of the government's 9/11 official story conspiracy theory are helping to seal Amerca's fate, perhaps even the world's fate, given the powerful influence of America.

This has become a serious problem for genuine and productive discourse on the issues facing us. Anyone doubting the official 9/11 story is immediately and entirely discredited by many on all that they might say. It's yet another example of successfully controlling the public dialogue and destroying healthy discourse.

Every time this issue brought up, it rattles people's nerves. The knee jerk reaction simply saddens me: the citizens of once great country, would so willingly lock themselves into a mental cage, and embrace this cage as a security capsule, separating them from the "outside evil".

COW, may I point out again the obvious to you? In the eyes of insane, you are simply crazy.

You be careful, otherwise one day, you might be determined by your government to be fit for mandatory admission in Asylum 626.

I am glad I don't live in the US.:eek:

[Master Shake]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

to clarify - I am not suggesting that 911 was an inside job - just to point out that there are precedents in the past where other govt's have performed false flag operations.

here is some more information...

fyi

Operation Mockingbird

Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence domestic and foreign media beginning in the 1950s.

The activities, extent and even the existence of the CIA project remain in dispute: the operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis' 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire. But Davis' book, alleging that the media had been recruited (and infiltrated) by the CIA for propaganda purposes, was itself controversial and has since been shown to have had a number of erroneous assertions.[1] More evidence of Mockingbird's existence emerged in the 2007 memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, by convicted Watergate "plumber" E. Howard Hunt and The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by Hugh Wilford (2008).[2]


Links:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird


Operation Northwoods:


Operation Northwoods, or Northwoods, was a false-flag plan that originated within the United States government in 1962. The plan called for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or other operatives to commit genuine acts of terrorism in U.S. cities and elsewhere. These acts of terrorism were to be blamed on Cuba in order to create public support for a war against that nation, which had recently become communist under Fidel Castro. One part of the Operation Northwoods plan was to "develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington."

Operation Northwoods included proposals for hijackings and bombings followed by the introduction of phony evidence that would implicate the Cuban government.....


Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

Sorry, but citing past instances of "plans" of false flag operations is not proof that 9-11 was one.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

You be careful, otherwise one day, you might be determined by your government to be fit for mandatory admission in Asylum 626.

That's ok. I'm an old man; my children are grown.

Perhaps I can figure a few things out and help a few others understand better. If something dire happened to me, that might be one more stimulus for better understanding in those who remain.

(Well, not that old, if measured by the years left me. If I stay healthy and avoid Asylum 626, I have a few more decades to enjoy in this life.)

[cindykimlisa]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

Good-Bye

Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.

Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.

Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”
Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.

Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.

Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.

Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.

Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”

And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted “studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the “studies.”

The Council of Europe is investigating the drug companies’ role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.

The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms.
And there is the global warming scandal, in which NGOs. the UN, and the nuclear industry colluded in concocting a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution.

Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.

Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job.

I remember when, following CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders. In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.

When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion alone of being a “threat,” he wasn’t impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don’t carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government.

As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO “performance bonuses,” have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession.

Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these “performance awards” by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about “the Muslim threat,” Wall Street, U.S. corporations and “free market” shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans.

Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.

Americans have bought into the government’s claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect “terrorists,” and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.

Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different.

I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.”

For the last six years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.

For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.

The American corporate does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.

America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.

These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington’s deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar’s value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called “entitlements” as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.

With over 21 per cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington’s greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the “war on terror,” the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.

The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts03242010.html

IMO

Another Blow Hard with sour grapes and a grudge

Wake up

Cindy

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

Sorry, but citing past instances of "plans" of false flag operations is not proof that 9-11 was one.

You pose a rather transparent paper tiger, good sir.

The citations of such past instances was not presented as proof that 9/11 was a false flag operation.

They were presented as evidence that consideration of that possibility is a fair topic of discussion, not a cause for vilifying the speaker and discrediting all they say.

I would encourage you to consider improving the quality of your rhetoric good sir, however I will confess to not being optimistic that such encouragement would bear good fruit.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

IMO

Another Blow Hard with sour grapes and a grudge

Wake up

Cindy

Oh dear, that's a harsh appraisal.

Pray tell what would we find if we woke up?

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

Every time this issue brought up, it rattles people's nerves.

That is a key point.

In the mind of whomever knew about 9/11 on 9/10, this rattling of nerves and fracturing of discourse is as intended.

[Master Shake]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

Sorry, but I've read enough conspiracy ravings about 9-11, and the thorough debunking of said ravings, that I have not one iota of patience with anyone entertaining notions about controlled demolition, radio-controlled planes, Jews being warned not to go to work that day, "nano thermite," & etc. So, anyone, who in the course of a discussion or essay, introduces the notion of the 9-11 attacks being somehow perpetrated by the US government, automatically taints their argument (and reputation), even though the other points they make, may have merit or be demonstrably true.

[Ann]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

Sorry, but I've read enough conspiracy ravings about 9-11, and the thorough debunking of said ravings, that I have not one iota of patience with anyone entertaining notions about controlled demolition, radio-controlled planes, Jews being warned not to go to work that day, "nano thermite," & etc. So, anyone, who in the course of a discussion or essay, introduces the notion of the 9-11 attacks being somehow perpetrated by the US government, automatically taints their argument (and reputation), even though the other points they make, may have merit or be demonstrably true.

Well said.

[aaron]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

"Only" 20% of the people in our country are having a hard time. 80% are doing OK. Those 20% collect government checks or blame themselves or are tea partyin', or have far more important things to worry about than some Taliban terrorist in a prison. My point is that if you are part of the 80%, what do you see*?

- Gas is cheaper
- Your stocks have recovered
- You refinanced to a lower interest rate
- Home prices have started increasing
- Health care reform is good
- Layoffs have stopped
- Your credit limit went back up
- Few troops have died
- Obama is watching out for us (financial reform, health reform)

I am sure there is a lot more you can add to the list.



* Compiled from conversations over the past year at the office cooler.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

automatically taints their argument (and reputation)

Thank-you. I'm honored to be so tainted.

[Yaowarat]

Re: Goodbye, Mr Roberts

He had me until this:

America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory.

Credibility shredded.

What next ?

A claim that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was faked, so that LBJ could escalate in Vietnam ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Incident


I've even heard the US was complicit in the bombing and sinking of its own ships to provoke a ME war, i.e USS Liberty ?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...3041501647311#

Yes, the government just doesn't engage in conspiratorial crimes against its own people. The gov't just doesn't lie.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods


The US just simply doesn't drug and ruin the minds of unsuspecting people:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MK_Ultra