Recently Truthout published an exclusive report based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and an interview with a former high-ranking counterterrorism official that showed how a little-known military intelligence unit, unbeknownst to the various investigative bodies probing the terrorist attacks, was ordered by senior government officials to stop tracking Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s movements prior to 9/11.

And now, in a stunning new interview made available to Truthout that is scheduled to air on a local PBS affiliate in Colorado tonight, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, for the first time, levels explosive allegations against three former top CIA officials – George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee – accusing them of knowingly withholding intelligence from the Bush and Clinton White House, the FBI, Immigration and the State and Defense Departments about two of the 9/11 hijackers who had entered the United States more than a year before the attacks. Moreover, Clarke says the former CIA officials likely engaged in a cover-up by withholding key details about two of the hijackers from the 9/11 Commission.

Of course, it also says, “he admits he doesn’t have evidence to back up…” but Clarke’s not quite insane for asking these questions.

Glenn Beck is creating a generation of conspiracy theorists on the right. What happens when a Republican is elected president? Will he keep on theorizing about the “end of America” or would it be the end of his show? Even if he had less to talk about, he’s riling up a bunch of people to see the government as nefarious. Maybe, finally, they’d start seeing the right as just as corrupt as the mainstream left. People aren’t going to suddenly lose their paranoia. Nor should they – as some paranoia is justifiable.  As much as people mock conspiracy theories, the people doing the mocking could probably use an extra dose of paranoia.

This is especially true on the left. There’s a post on Daily Kos today (as there is every day) disappointed in Obama’s call for bipartisanship. They say the same old things: Obama’s not a fighter, bipartisanship doesn’t work when the other side wants you to fail, etc. Most don’t take into account that the Obama administration likes the hysteria of the far right – so long as Obama’s agenda is seen as communist, he can be as conservative as he wants.  “Compromise” is just a word for doing what he’s been doing all along – only making it more obvious.

And Fox sculpts this narrative, which is why it is – on balance – awful.  But it also appeals to people’s lowest common denominator stupidity.  And as much as I’d like the UFO issue to be intellectualized, it takes a certain leap from rationality to go down that path.  And Fox seems to be paving that path. It’s a small step from calling George Soros an apocalyptic puppet-master to calling him an Ickean reptile.  Not that I want Glenn Beck to go the full Icke, but it is only on the right that conspiracies are allowed to enter the mainstream.

Of course, it’s mixed together with blatantly false lies, so the real conspiracies are instantly discredited, but in a weird way, maybe this is how the fringe becomes legitimized.  The fringe of the Republican party is fucking scary, but look at this: the same network that carries water for Bush is actually reporting on Building 7.  MSNBC and other networks are too “reasonable” to ever bring this up.  So there is some small percentage of value in having people more open to lunatic ideas.

But beyond that, lumping together all conspiracies under the same umbrella is a strange kind of racism.  As if people who believe in the moon landing hoax are exactly the same as people who question JFK’s assassination. It’s just a method of ridicule without taking the time to look at any of the underlying evidence.  Michael Shermer turns out to be the conspiracy theorist - all conspiracies are working in collusion. More and more – I won’t say I’m regretting – I’m questioning some of the assumptions I made in my recent Reality Sandwich piece.  Not that 9-11 truth is an absolute certainty, but the arguments for the other side are sometimes so dubious that it may not be useful to give them too much credit – which is why people were so upset with my assumptions.

What’s interesting is that if you look at the comments throughout the web whenever 9-11 is mentioned – whether it’s the Huffington Post, Youtube, or anywhere – many people are questioning the official 9-11 story.  It’s just that the mainstream will not – viva la web. In a strange way, it’s the Obama administration that’s leading to this conclusion – not the Bush administration. Those Obama supporters who have seen Obama protect torturers, continue the war in Afghanistan, oversee a government that raids peace activists, etc. see that government can be kind of fucked.

There’s a whole lot of disillusionment going on – which is a cousin to paranoia.  To not be somewhat disillusioned in the state of the world, and not understand that the government doesn’t always have the long-term interest of the country at heart, doesn’t make people conspiracy theorists, it just means they’re paying attention.  All Shermer is saying is: don’t trust people who don’t blindly trust everything the government does. Sure, some of these theories can be ludicrous, but it’s equally ludicrous to trust everything coming out of a politician’s mouth. And it’s just as ludicrous to believe the perspective of skeptics who don’t offer proof for their skepticism.  That some people have stupid ideas isn’t proof that all conspiracies are false.

There are no “references” to revolution and rebellion, there is insurgency. There is no “flirtation” with the use of force, there is the unrestrained use of force. There is not “sometimes” outright talk of war, there is the waging of war.

What then was the war in Iraq, a war where hundreds of thousands have died? This is a total revision of history – a person who doesn’t see the violent overuse of power by the American military as bad as Islamic radicalism.  Both kill people.

There’s a difference between the motives: religion vs. protecting business interests.  “Keeping us safe” and “Freedom” is a 1984-caliber smokescreen.  And, frankly, the jury’s still out about what degree of religious certainty is driving the American right’s ideas about reforming the Middle East.  This is an issue that the liberal “elite” seem too timid to consider – as if acknowledging this kind of extremism is beneath consideration.  But the Pat Robertson right is growing in this country in positions of high power. If that’s not terrifying, there’s something wrong.

One of the important things about 9-11 truth is not necessarily proving who brought down the towers, but it’s important for people to at least be open to the possibility that the military industrial complex is capable of such an act. To understand that there are deeper machinations behind these wars than the official story – whether it’s oil, money, religion, or all of the above.  If it was somehow proven that “9-11 was an inside job” this wouldn’t just shake the foundation of the Bush-supporting right, but the left who are too “reasonable” to ever think the American military is capable of that kind of evil. Even when that same American military starts unnecessary wars.

As I wrote in my Reality Sandwich piece (and something I got torn apart for, though I didn’t mind it because I was able to articulate my position)  the truth movement is not entirely necessary – the Project for a New American Center desired a 9-11-caliber event.  And when they got their event, the first thing they did was go to war with a country that didn’t attack us. Their goal was to remake the world – much as the fanatical Islamists want to remake the world in their own image.  These types of fanaticism are different, but they’re both sinister. And when you add the Bible thumping of the new right to the nation building of Dick Cheney, the hawkish right is capable of terrible catastrophes.

What it boils down to is that mainstream liberals aren’t paranoid enough.  Interestingly, Markos Moulitsas bans all conversation about 9-11 truth from the Daily Kos, yet at the same time thinks that the far right is Taliban-esque.  Who in the mainstream left doesn’t think Dick Cheney is capable of a 9-11 event?  Is he too good for that – the man who orchestrated a war that killed thousands more than died on 9-11?   That’s all that matters – there’s no need for non-conspiracy-minded liberals to deconstruct engineering theory about how the towers fell, but just take a look at what happened in the aftermath.  And if the right is capable of taking us into unnecessary wars, they’re capable of worse.  Just today, there was evidence that the U.S. military has contributed to the catastrophic flood in Pakistan as a way of protecting their own interests.

That may be a case of the military at work, rather than the “American Taliban” but this is just to point out that there is a lot of destruction left in our wake that isn’t getting enough attention – because it’s not as rag-tag as a group of fanatical terrorists living in a desert. As if a country as wealthy and powerful as ours could never be that irrational.  If you look at how the world’s unfolding via the economy, militancy, the environment, and so on, “rational” doesn’t seem to be the driving force.   To diminish those faults by saying that it “isn’t as bad as the Taliban” is only looking at the present without considering the future, and there’s as much danger in that as other forms of non-sustainability – whether it’s environmental damage, market deregulation, or other liberal causes. It’s another case of ignoring the obvious signs that could lead to a possible grim future. In this day and age, it’s more reasonable to be paranoid.  And Adam Serwer has a paranoia deficiency.  In fact, he totally rewrites history.

Unsurprisingly, maybe, some are pissed at me in the comments for even mentioning that “Popular Mechanics” might have a point or two. There’s no definitive answer about that day – no matter how convincing the engineers for truth or the debunkers may sometimes be. Mostly though, I’m tired of the constant fear and paranoia unleashed by 9-11 truth topics. If they are capable of that, they’re capable of anything. In a strange way, linking 9-11 and consciousness together gives me more control of the future – I can potentially tap into collective consciousness, but I will never be invited into a Cheney-led meeting about beginning the end of the world.

One thing I don’t see expressed very often is: why?  Why even bother putting explosives in the towers?  The effects of two planes hitting the World Trade Center would have sparked outrage and the desire for war.  Maybe not the same as watching the towers fall, which was like watching reality itself dissolve away, but still this would have been an act of war that could have equally justified a war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And so my head is going in another direction.  I’m not saying I believe this theory, but I do believe it’s possible at some stage in human history.  There are two basic esoteric components: collective consciousness and the idea that the mind constructs reality:

Idealism is the notion that the mind produces the world. Bishop Berkeley is the philosopher most associated with this idea, which is similar to Hindu beliefs. Positivism is the similar notion that the mind constructs our reality. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is basically positivist.

Maybe (an extreme maybe) what we saw on 9-11 was an example of that.  If nothing else, this provides a way to explore ideas about what collective consciousness is capable – namely that collective human fear was what brought down the towers.  Look at this report from the Global Consciousness Project:

About the GCP:

The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is an international effort involving researchers from several institutions and countries, designed to explore whether the construct of interconnected consciousness can be scientifically validated through objective measurement. The project builds on excellent experiments conducted over the past 35 years at a number of laboratories, demonstrating that human consciousness interacts with random event generators (REGs), apparently “causing” them to produce non-random patterns. A description of the technical implementation is given under procedures.

The experimental results clearly show that a broader examination of this phenomenon is warranted. In recent work, prior to the Global Consciousness Project, an array of REG devices in Europe and the US showed non-random activity during widely shared experiences of deeply engaging events.

Here’s a direct link to the GCP’s findings.  Similar tests have been done regarding mind-matter interaction.

So there is some “proof” that 9-11 affected people’s “connected consciousness.” Millions of people’s minds were focused on those two towers. What’s interesting is that the tower that was hit second fell first. To theorize – it’s at this point that people realized it wasn’t a terrible accident with one plane, but it was a coordinated act of murder. So sociologically and psychologically, the second plane had a much bigger effect. What’s also interesting is that the two buildings fell in an identical matter, even though they were hit in different places. It was as if the reality of all past history was dissolved. My God, everyone thought at once, the world as we know it is over. This collective thought then manifested in the towers dissolving before everyone’s eyes. It gives new meaning to “9-11 was an inside job.” Not inside the government, but inside the mind.

Interestingly, David Ray Griffin – the main proponent of engineering-based trutherism – actually has a spiritual explanation for 9-11 as well (which could cause some to doubt his other theories):

My thesis is that the attacks of 9/11 were products of demonic consciousness, with “the demonic” understood as an emergent reality that is diametrically opposed to the creative power of the universe and strong enough to threaten its purposes. To explain how demonic power can arise in a monotheistic universe. I use the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, with some help from Carl Jung. Then to explain how demonic evil arose historically, I employ ideas from Andrew Bard Schmookler’s Parable of the Tribes. Finally, arguing that this demonic consciousness now exists most powerfully in the USA, I suggest that a preeminent manifestation of it in our time was 9/11, orchestrated by the Bush-Cheney administration. In making this latter argument, I will draw on my two books on the subject: The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions.

This would “explain” how the fires in the twin towers burned for weeks after the event.  Not because of thermite, because this was literally hell on earth.  The collective consciousness theory also “explains” the fires – the collective fear was palpable for months afterward.  One thing I also don’t see mentioned very often is that on the night of 9-11 there was a massive thunderstorm.  Already reeling with stress from seeing the planes hit and witnessing the massive explosions, I was sleepless as the thunder pounded over and over again in a torrential rain.  It had an almost Biblical quality – a merciful rain to wash away the dust, but also a kind of judgment.

Do I believe any of this is what happened? No. Do I believe that – at some point – we may be self-aware of collective consciousness? Yes, at least to a larger degree than I believe the first proposition. And 9-11 was the biggest event in human history during the media age when an event was witnessed all around the world in real time, so it’s the best starting point for investigation into this phenomenon.

All told, 9-11 was shocking and mysterious, which is why it inspires so much anger and conspiracy theorizing. Those buildings really did seem to fall in a way that defies rational explanation. The whole day defies rational explanation – it’s so beyond everyday experience. This theory doesn’t explain other anomalies, like the absence of a plane at the Pentagon, Building 7, etc. But regardless of what you think of this theory being literally true, there’s no denying that 9-11 began a major shift in consciousness, and whether or not this consciousness can bend matter is only part of the story, as it changed people’s conception of the world in a way that’s not fully complete.

Update: Reposted on Reality Sandwich. Many angry and interesting comments there.

In one of her recent studies on reactions to 9/11, Ganzel and colleagues scanned the brains of people in this resilient group, between three and four years after they had experienced the attacks up close. When those people looked at pictures of emotion-filled faces, the researchers reported in 2008 in the journal NeuroImage, their brains looked different from the brains of people who were further away from the World Trade Center.

In particular, those who were nearby showed strong reactions in their amygdalas, the part of the brain that forms emotional memories. Their reaction to stress was also higher, with bigger spikes in levels of the stress hormone cortisol, the researchers reported in a different paper.

What’s amazing is that these changes to the brain could potentially be passed down from mother to child. See: Children Can Inherit Mom’s Abuse-Altered Brain:

Physical and chemical changes in the body caused by abuse early in life can be passed down from mother to child, a recent study shows.

The review of published research by behavioral scientists at Emory University in Atlanta was based on studies that show how early life stress (ELS), such as physical and emotional abuse and neglect, leads to observable changes in the brain’s hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis….

What’s more, the functional and physical changes caused by ELS can be passed along from female victims to their children.

The above seems to suggest trauma alters the brain most severely (abuse, 9-11).  This is good news too, lending credence to the notion that ideas are like a virus – not only in how they’re spread, but how they might attach themselves to the brain.  Positive ideas could also have the potential of altering brain chemistry. Neuroplasticity suggests that the brain rewires itself no matter what the experience – though the fight or flight of trauma makes the most sense in terms of Darwinian evolution.

Could this be the stuff of consciousness evolution? The brain is altered significantly from some major event, which is then passed from parent to child. I just hope major negative trauma isn’t the only catalyzing force required. In other words, a major event like World War III might cause the brain to adapt so such a war would never happen again – a form of self-preservation.  First contact would also be traumatic – but also potentially positive – which would permanently alter how the brain perceives the universe.

Evolutionary psychology would bear this out – and something on so grand a scale as extinction would lead to a very serious, and possibly fast, adaptation.  Totally rewriting our religious and scientific worldview via first contact would also lead to a new adaptation.

Steven Pinker has this to say:

Q: Can you talk about the rewiring of the human brain?

A: You have to remember that human intelligence and intelligent behavior don’t just come from having a whole bunch of stuff packed into our skull like meatloaf. The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred billion nerve cells, probably a hundred trillion connections. It’s just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways in which they’re arranged in a baby’s head. And a lot of our evolution consisted not just in getting more of this stuff, but in wiring it in precise ways to support intelligence.

Q: Does Darwinian evolution allow for such internal rewiring as part of its process?

A: There are lots of ways in which Darwinian natural selection could rewire a brain. There are chemicals that are released in the growing brain that attract nerve cells, encouraging them to grow in certain pathways versus others. There are molecules at the tips of the growing neurons that can engage or not engage some target, like a lock and a key. There are rules for when brain cells die in what part of the brain, so that they might grow in one part, die off in another. All of these are under the control of genes, and as genes evolve, the way they do throughout evolution, the wiring of the brain can change.

Of course, this isn’t an overnight process, but the next evolution could be one of brain power – in the sense that we could have the power to direct our own evolution. Possibly.  Clearly, though, we’re not evolving fast enough.  And if negative trauma is the thing that will lead to human evolution, it’s no surprise why our world’s allowed to remain so traumatic.

Synopsis:

A group of young, mildly douchey friends are spending the weekend partying at a swanky hotel on the outskirts of Los Angeles. After a night of revelry, they are awakened at 4:27 AM by strange, booming noises. They head outside to see strange blue lights vaporizing downtown Los Angeles. When two of the characters go out to the roof to investigate, they see UFOs descend from the clouds, and other people start getting sucked off the rooftops into the ships.

So, “Cloverfield” meets “War of the Worlds.”  Curiously, L.A. seems to be the main target of aliens these days.  TABOTD takes place in L.A., as does my life.

My problem with these movies is not just that the alien story is potentially more multi-faceted than they’re here to kill us. It’s propagating a fear of the other, and trumping up the idea that it’s always a good idea to go to war with the other. That it’s playing on terrorist paranoia is not really much of an insight, but our response to terrorism is to go to war with two countries where we shouldn’t have been. But not only that – the Bush administration and the media painted terrorists as a black and white boogie men, while overlooking our own deficiencies – killing hundreds of thousands, displacing families, torture. So it’s relaxing to have a movie where an antagonist is so unquestioningly evil, but it’s also a dangerous sort of conditioning.

I find it uniquely mysterious that there were so many disaster movies in the late nineties before 9-11 – “Independence Day,” “Volcano,” “Deep Impact,” “Armageddon,” even “Titanic.” Not for a second saying that there was a conspiratorial effort to condition people, but when people said, over and over again about 9-11, “It was like watching a movie,” they’re also remembering the black and white antagonists of Hollywood blockbusters. If 9-11 was like a movie, so was the impulse to bomb the shit out of anybody after it. We’re still there, long after the death wish for revenge is gone from the country’s psyche.

I’ve written two novels about Hollywood, so I’m not just obsessed with the UFO issue, but how pop culture sculpts popular thought, and there’s so much more that could be explored about the topic of UFOs – but it’s usually covered with violence or mockery. Frankly, that’s as un-nuanced a position as the blatherings of the Republican base.

Glenn Greenwald:

We chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, but this is the Real U.S. Government: functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.

Anyone who thinks that’s hyperbole should just read some of what Priest and Arkin chronicle. Consider this: “Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.” To call that an out-of-control, privacy-destroying Surveillance State is to understate the case. Equally understated is the observation that we have become a militarized nation living under an omnipotent, self-perpetuating, bankrupting National Security State.

I’ll leave it to the New York Times review to sum this up perfectly:

The problem with “The Reflecting Pool,” an investigative drama that mucks around with 9/11 conspiracy theories, is not that its ideas are silly. Strictly from an imaginative point of view, there is something unnerving about the weirdly elegant way the towers fell. And not just the north and south buildings but also the adjacent 7 World Trade Center, a smaller edifice, suffering much less damage, that collapsed in an identical manner but received far less coverage from — what’s the phrase I’m looking for? — oh yes: a complicit, propaganda-foisting media/industrial complex in the pocket of the Bush administration and the Jews and the oil industry!

Er, to continue. The problem, which dwarfs whatever you might feel about the topic, is in the drama, or utter lack thereof. Written and directed by Jarek Kupsc, the movie has the tone, rhythm and structure of a set of numbered, handwritten notes derived from 9/11 conspiracy Web sites, photocopied at Kinko’s and distributed at an anarchist bookshop.

This pamphlet narrative follows the efforts of Alex Prokop (Mr. Kupsc again), an investigative journalist for a lefty magazine about to “go corporate,” and Paul Cooper (Joseph Culp), a 9/11 obsessive whose daughter died in the attack, to unearth the truth in the face of suppressed information, disturbing ambiguities and, when needling the powers that be, their own amateurism.

It’s perfect because the reviewer’s right – it’s basically just a series of articles put into dialog. But it also shows how little attention this issue gets. The reviewer spends no time discussing whether the ideas may be valid, and it’s mostly just mockery – which is the point of the movie itself.

Here are some smart people on the topic:

http://www.ae911truth.org/

http://www.stj911.org/