None So Blind As Those Who "Saw It With My Own Eyes"

I was visiting with my 92-year-old mother (actually, she's 91, but in her 92nd year, truth be told), in the Eastern Heartland of central Pennsylvania over the past week or so.

I was heartened to see a series of three Ron Paul Revolution/RLoveUtion yard signs all in a row. Mom, who used to be a "little old lady in tennis sneakers" (and for about 25 years the chairman of her town Republican Committee), noted that in each of those homes lived related family members. Apparently all of similar mind.

I stopped for a moment to ask one family member, who was weed-wacking the tall grass that ran up a 6-foot berm from the edge of the 16-rod road (those narrow, but paved, old country roads with a high crown and new pavement dressing only in front of the houses — to keep down the dust that maybe would choke the livestock and soil the freshly washed clothes hanging out on the line to dry — up to his large, lush lawn) what in particular got him about Ron Paul. It was Paul's view of the Constitution as being the most significant thing we have to keep the country together, then Iraq, health care, the wrecked economy, gasoline, food. I told him that's why I was trying to get on the ballot to run for Congress in my Commonwealth (both MA and PA have that in common, as well as lush green flora in the spring). He wished me luck. 

However, I was later disheartened to hear from another denizen of this Heartland, one whose opinion I take seriously given all the education he's had and his general overall smarts, that there was nothing further to discuss about the events of September 11, 2001. "I saw it with my own eyes," he said.

While his practice, and most of his education, is in medicine and biology, not physics, he's pretty much a renaissance man. So it troubled me that he has absolutely no opening to even consider what I figure were the 43,000-or-so separate explosive devices that were required to demolish the three World Trade Center buildings, the WTC buildings numbered 1, 2 & 7, that were taken down on 9/11/01. Towers #1 and #2 were EXploded, while the 47-story Salomon Building, which Larry Silverstein said was "pulled," or demolished with carefully placed and timed  explosives, was IMploded, the more "classic" method of building demolition, as it limits damage to adjacent buildings — for which damage the demolitions firm or the demolished buildings' owners would have to pay.

In the case of WTC #7, there were three adjacent buildings Silverstein did not control. But in the case of WTC #1 and #2, there was a good bit of distance between the towers and neighboring buildings. But even that distance was not enough. Because of the extreme force of the explosives (tell me how else 220 floors of 4-inch, reinforced concrete would get pulverized to dust, even at the very top-most floors, onto which nothing could "pancake"), multi-ton hunks of the towers still managed to cross the open spaces and stick high up into the buildings as if Thor had turned his thunderbolts into projectiles for a dart game with Loki. And I certainly hold that the stories  about Thor and Loki, Odin and Freya, are more credible than the modern oral mythology Phillip Zelikow set to words in his best-selling novel, The Official 9/11 Commission Report.

I remember seeing an interesting film in my Evidence class in the third year of law school. The topic under consideration was eye-witness testimony. I don't remember all the details, but it was set up to provide several "episodes" of the same story, each episode providing more "middle" to the brief beginning and ending events that began the series. 

The tape was paused after each episode, and class members were asked to "testify" as to what they'd observed. The majority of us agreed that the first scene showed a crime being committed, something like a wallet-snatching as best I can remember. But the tape only showed a somewhat disconcerted-looking woman rummaging in her purse, followed by a shot of a young man running and turning into an alley. There was no "middle" to the story, but we created one.

As more information was revealed, the crime story was embellished with the new details, until finally the full sequence was played, and the "crime" turned into a woman looking for coins to make a phone call and the man chasing after his hat, which a gust of wind had blown into the alley.

Our professor noted that this was the pernicious difficulty with eye-witness testimony: people make stuff up to complete incomplete stories. And they're adamant about what they've "seen with their own eyes." It takes very, very careful interrogation — with absolutely NO information furnished by the interrogator (no "leading the witness" permitted) — to establish what the witness said she saw and what she actually did see.

Of course, when someone is ready to hand with details, opinions, assessments of what was there to be seen, the placebo effect (leading the witness with suggestions, conclusions, etc.) takes over, and even the "smartest" of people become unable to distinguish between what they actually perceived and what they think they MUST have seen in order for it to fit the conclusion that they reached about what they "saw with their own eyes."

And of course the "smarter" people think they are, the more certain they are about the "reality" of their conclusions. None so blind as those who would not see, goes the apothegm. Furthermore, when there is a well-nigh incessant repetition of the official myth, it is difficult for anyone to escape the mythology. Tell a lie big enough and long enough and everyone will believe it, goes the Hitlerian or Goebbelsian trope. Or, as Sir Arthur Ponsonby put it in his reflections on British WWI propaganda, Falsehood In War-Time, 

A good deal depends on the quality of the lie. You must have intellectual lies for intellectual people and crude lies for popular consumption, but if your popular lies are too blatant and your more intellectual section are shocked and see through them, they may (and indeed they did) begin to be suspicious as to whether they were not being hoodwinked too. Nevertheless, the inmates of colleges are just as credulous as the inmates of the slums.

Perhaps nothing did more to impress the public mind — and this is true in all countries — than the assistance given in propaganda by intellectuals and literary notables. They were able to clothe the tough tissue of falsehood with phrases of literary merit and passages of eloquence better than the statesmen. Sometimes by expressions of spurious impartiality, at other times by rhetorical indignation, they could by their literary skill give this or that lie the stamp of indubitable authenticity, even without the shadow of a proof, or incidentally refer to it as an accepted fact.* The narrowest patriotism could be made to appear noble, the foulest accusations could be represented as an indignant outburst of humanitarianism, and the meanest and most vindictive aims falsely disguised as idealism. Everything was legitimate which could make the soldiers go on fighting. [Emphasis added. Ed.]

 [* Recall the disgusting Iraq cheerleading performance of virtually all of our "MSM," our  Mainstream Media. As Tejas populist Jim Hightower put it, in the title of his recent book, Swim Against the Current, Folks! (Even a dead fish can go with the… mainstream).  Hightower uses flow instead of mainstream, but mainstream works better for my purposes. Wm.]

There may soon come a time when the "official" 9/11 mythology evaporates and US citizens who have become less than patient with the eight years of lies told by our Unitary Liar-In-Chief and the Cheney/Bush administration in general to actually start investigating the "true facts" about what happened before, during and after 9/11/2001.

However improbable it may seem, there are SOME — not many, but some — of our high officials who may actually be embarrassed into finally honoring their oaths of office and actually "support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and Cheney, et al." Or they may be voted out of office and replaced by men and women who WILL take seriously their promise to We the People, so help them, Higher Power. (And we're not talking George H.P. Bush here.)

So far, by my reckoning, maybe only three members of Congress, Reps. Paul and Kucinich, and certainly Sen. Byrd, take their oaths seriously. Sen. Pat Leahy talks a good game on the topic, but, sadly, seems unwilling to go the extra mile and have Congress's Sergeant-At-Arms arrest and imprison all the folks of the Cheney/Bush Administration currently in Contempt of Congress. The Capitol, I read, actually has jail cells somewhere in the basement. It certainly wouldn't take much additional effort to add water-boarding equipment. Maybe these administration miscreants could be made to confess their roles in the murders, etc., on 9/11/01. (Ahh, but would this testimony be admissible in a special military tribunal, I wonder.)

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