Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
A career Neo-Con hack with intimate ties to the CIA has shamefully exploited the tragic massacre at Fort Hood last week to smear anyone who questions the official 9/11 story as a gun-toting terrorist intent on mass murder on a par with crazed killer Nidal Malik Hasan.
In an opinion piece, UPI editor at large Arnaud De Borchgrave disgracefully claims that, “There are tens of thousands of Hasans all over the Western world — from Brussels to Berlin and from Burgos, Spain, to Birmingham, U.K.,” before making the case that anyone who dares doubt the government’s version of events on 9/11 is an extremist hell-bent on metering out “jihadi violence” like Hasan did when he gunned down scores of his colleagues.
“For them, Sept. 11, 2001, was a conspiracy cooked up by the CIA and Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence service,” writes Borchgrave.
Borchgrave’s bellicose hit piece harks back to the November 2007 hearing of the Homeland Security Subcommittee’s “Terrorism and the Internet,” which was broadcast on C-Span and chaired by California democrat Jane Harman, sponsor of the infamous HR 1955, “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007.” During the hearing, a powerpoint demonstration from Mark Weitzman of the Simon Weisenthal Center ludicrously equated Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization consisting of professionals who are investigating the collapse of WTC 7 and the twin towers, with violent Islamic terrorists.
Borchgrave outlines his argument with the usual turd-load of ad hominem drivel and half-baked strawman claims. At no point whatsoever does he present any evidence that Hasan embraced 9/11 conspiracies, which would totally contradict separate reports that Hasan is linked with members of Al-Qaeda.
“Even though al-Qaida’s Osama bin Laden and his No. 2 Ajman Al-Zawahiri have both taken credit for Sept. 11, countless millions are convinced they had nothing to do with the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon,” he writes.
If Borchgrave had bothered to do one iota of research before spewing his vitriol, he would have discovered that on numerous occasions immediately after the attacks, Bin Laden explicitly denied responsibility for 9/11.
In a statement released to the Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera and reported on by CNN on September 17, 2001, Bin Laden said, “I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons. I have been living in the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders’ rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations.”
Asked if he carried out 9/11 by the Pakistani newspaper Ummat on September 28, 2001, Bin Laden responded, “I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle.”
The only person to “take credit” for the attacks was a dubiously fat Bin Laden lookalike who appeared on a videotape that was broadcast on December 13, 2001. Freedom Of Information Act requests attempting to validate the tape’s authenticity filed with the FBI, CIA, Department of Defense, and CENTCOM were met with a refusal to release any records. The FBI’s Most Wanted page still fails to list 9/11 on Bin Laden’s rap sheet because “the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11,” according to FBI agent Rex Tomb.
The tape was allegedly found in a house in Jalalabad after anti-Taliban forces moved in. It featured a fat Osama laughing and joking about how he’d carried out 9/11. The video was also mistranslated in order to manipulate viewer opinion and featured “Bin Laden” praising two of the hijackers, only he got their names wrong.
This Osama also uses the wrong hand to write with and wears gold rings, a practice considered abhorrent to the Muslim faith.
A German TV Channel One investigation found that the White House’s translation of the video was inaccurate and “manipulative”. One of the experts employed by the program to study the video concluded that the translation was “Very problematic – at the most important places where it is held to prove the guilt of Bin Laden, it is not identical with the Arabic.”
“Prof. Gernot Rotter, professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the Asia-Africa Institute at the University of Hamburg sums it up: “The American translators who listened to the tapes and transcribed them apparently wrote a lot of things in that they wanted to hear but that cannot be heard on the tape no matter how many times you listen to it.”
In his hit piece, Borchgrave recycles a number of strawman issues that aren’t even embraced by the majority of the 9/11 truth movement in a pathetic effort to equate questioning 9/11 with Holocaust denial, which routinely serves as the last refuge of those who are losing the argument and have to resort to intimidation in an attempt to demonize the target of their attack.
Borchgrave’s motivation for smearing people who question the official version of 9/11 as crazed killers would be something of a mystery if not for the fact that, as a result of his dutiful lifelong propaganda in service of the U.S. military-industrial complex, he was tapped for recruitment by the CIA on two separate occasions and has remained in close contact with the Agency throughout his career as a journalist.
Borchgrave considered his “key, best sources of information” in the world the heads of “intelligence services in Washington, London, Tel Aviv, and Pretoria, each of which I stay in close contact with.”
Borchgrave was also affiliated with CAUSA, an “educational organization” created in New York City in 1980 by members of the Unification Church at the suggestion of Rev. Sun Myung Moon (owner of Borchgrave’s primary employers, UPI and the Washington Times), that sought to propagandize in favor of the Contra leadership during the time when they were being armed and funded by the CIA during the Iran-Contra scandal.
Borchgrave dispensed with any of the tenets of a true journalist more than 30 years ago by acting as an apologist for government deception and disinformation. In 1978, he told the Covert Action Information Bulletin that it was acceptable for authorities to oversee “management of the news” in order to “put the best face possible face” on what they were doing.
Borchgrave infamously peddled a hoax story in a crude attempt to generate support for the war in Iraq in 2003. According to SourceWatch, “Borchgrave was instrumental in laundering a story about a recanting peace-activist who “saw the light” in Iraq before the war. Although Joseph went to Iraq to protest against the impending war in 2003, while in Baghdad, he changed his mind, and now favored the war. It transpires that this was a hoax, there was no “Kenneth Joseph”, and the details can be read here.”
Borchgrave’s TV appearances are handled by Benador Associates, a public relations firm that provided enthusiastic Neo-Con cheerleaders for the war on Iraq during the now exposed Bush-Pentagon military propaganda program.
In May 2006, Benador were disgraced when it emerged that they had planted a fake story that later appeared in the National Post of Canada claiming that “Iran’s government had passed a law requiring Jewish residents to wear a yellow insignia — reminiscent of the policies of Germany’s Nazi regime.” The story was planted with the aid of Iranian exile Amir Taheri, who was later brought to the White House to consult with George W. Bush as an “expert” on the situation in Iraq.
According to the PR group’s founder Eleana Benador, planting fake stories in the media is a noble pursuit. “As much as being accurate is important, in the end it’s important to side with what’s right. What’s wrong is siding with the terrorists,” she told the Nation, who exposed the PR firm in an article entitled “Bunkum From Benador”.
As a result of his doting fealty to the U.S. war machine, some commentators have accused Borchgrave of being an outright disinformation agent, peddling his own brand of bunkum on a regular basis.
Again from SourceWatch, “William Preston and Ellen Ray wrote a history of disinformation in the U.S., and observed: “The greatest assistance in disinformation – especially during the current Administration – is always forthcoming from the Reader’s Digest. In 1977 the Times exposed Digest editor John Barron as having worked hand in glove with the CIA on a book about the KGB. Other fraudulent journalists like Robert Moss, Arnaud de Borchgrave, Daniel James, Claire Sterling, and Michael Ledeen, among others, seem to pick up disinformation themes almost automatically. In fact, coordination between the development of propaganda and disinformation themes by the covert media assets, the overt propaganda machine, and the bevy of puppet journalists is quite calculated. A theme which is floated on one level – a feature item on VOA about Cuba for example – will appear within record time as a lead article in Reader’s Digest, or a feature in a Heritage Foundation report, or a series of “exposes” by Moss and de Borchgrave or Daniel James in some reactionary tabloid like Human Events or the Washington Times or Inquirer. Then they will be called to testify by Senator Denton’s Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, repeating one another’s allegations as “expert witnesses”.
“After that they are given credibility by the “respectable” Cold War publications like the National Review, Commentary, and the New Republic. And finally, since they have repeated the theme so many times it must be true, they are given the opportunity to write Op Ed pieces for the New York Times or the Washington Post.”
The fact that the truth movement is being attacked and equated with terrorists for suggesting high-level government involvement in 9/11 by a man who has more spook connections than James Bond and less journalistic integrity than the average National Inquirer hack should serve as a badge of honor.
Borchgrave’s inane rantings have provided us with the perfect opportunity to expose him and his ilk for exactly what they are – intellectual prostitutes for the establishment with no credibility, no facts, and an agenda completely focused around lies, deception and bias.
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