Why Chomsky Is Wrong About 9/11

My 2016 Left Forum talk that was nuked by YouTube

Watch on Rumble Watch on Bitchute Read my email correspondence with Chomsky

This talk was delivered at the Left Forum in New York City on May 21, 2016. It accumulated thousands of views before YouTube nuked the Truth Jihad Radio channel last year.

This talk led to my being banned from the Left Forum the following year. (See also here and here.)

Below is the full text of the talk, alongside the images.

Moderator: Next up is Dr. Kevin Barrett. Dr. Barrett, a PhD Arabist-Islamologist, holds advanced degrees in English literature, French literature and African literature, and is the author of three books, including Questioning the War on Terror: A Primer for Obama Voters, published in 2009, which deconstructs the war on terror "through Socratic questioning." Dr. Barrett was also the lead editor, along with John Cobb and Sandra Lubarsky, of 9/11 and American Empire Volume Two: Christians, Jews and Muslims Speak Out. His other books include Another French False Flag, Bloody Tracks from Paris to San Bernardino; We Are Not Charlie Hebdo Freethinkers Questioning the French 9/11; and Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie. Dr. Barrett has taught the French and Arabic languages, African literature, English, humanities, religious studies, and folklore at colleges and universities in the US and abroad. He has been a Muslim since 1993 and is dedicated to spreading the truth to build a sustainable future. He has both a scholarly and personal interest in Islamic spirituality and wrote a PhD dissertation comparing medieval North African Saints legends to contemporary personal experience narratives from the Fez and Ouija regions of Morocco. He is a co-founder of the Muslin Jewish Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth and Muslims for 9/11 Truth, and has lectured widely throughout the US as well as in Canada and Morocco. Blacklisted from teaching at the University of Wisconsin system since 2006, Dr. Barrett has worked as a talk radio host, author, public speaker and congressional candidate in Wisconsin's third district in 2008. One of the best known critics of the war on terror, Dr. Barrett, has appeared on FOX, CNN, PBS, ABC TV and Univision, and has been the subject of op-eds and feature stories in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor and other publications. I'm sorry for rushing through this quickly, but we'd like to hear everything that Dr. Barrett has to say. I give you Dr. Barrett.

Kevin Barrett: Thank you. My title is Why Chomsky is Wrong about 9/11. If I tried to cover that in full detail, we'd be here all night. So this is going to be the short version. But let's see, we have the first slide here: He's not wrong about everything. And we'll touch on the points where where he is right. And ultimately, we'll go through a lot of areas where he doesn't even really rise to the level of being wrong, because he's not saying anything coherent. I will try to find what he does say that's coherent and make some sense of it.

So the next slide is the back cover of his book and my reaction to it.

That's Hillary Clinton allegedly witnessing the execution of Osama bin Laden on live simulcast, just like some people are witnessing this speech on live simulcast. And some of them are probably (likewise) putting their hands on their mouths in shock. Actually, Chomsky doesn't tell you in the new version of his book, 9/11, that that picture is simply a photo op.

Chomsky is the man who wrote the book on 9/11 from the viewpoint of the American left. The original version of this book came out in November 2001, and it was reissued in, I think, 2011 as a ten year anniversary thing. And on the back cover is this picture of Hillary Clinton "shocked by bin Laden's execution." Well, Chomsky doesn't even tell you in the book that that picture is simply a photo op and that there was, in fact, no such live simulcast.

This was one of the many lies that were put out and that have been exposed, even in the mainstream in this case. And it's kind of interesting that he would put this on the cover of the book without telling you that they weren't even really watching the alleged execution of bin Laden. He also doesn't go into the many, many other lies about the alleged execution of bin Laden that have been exposed by people like Seymour Hersh, who said that the entire story of the supposed killing of bin Laden is just one big lie, that nothing remotely like that even happened.

But just because Chomsky can be very, very wrong on these matters doesn't mean he's wrong about everything. He's certainly right about this: that "the general population doesn't know what's happening and doesn't even know that it doesn't know."

I guess that's sort of a counterpart to what Rumsfeld said about the known knowns and the unknown knowns and the known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Noam and I are on the same page with that.

But here's where he's really right.

You've got to give him his due. I'm friends with Andre Vltchek, Chomsky's co-author of On Western Terrorism. Andre is a regular global roving correspondent for my radio show, Truth Jihad Radio. Andre and Noam counted up the victims of Western terrorism since World War Two in US military interventions all over the world, and came up with something like 55 to 60 million people murdered by our tax dollars, virtually all of them innocent civilians. So he has a point when he points out that these crimes are vastly greater than 9/11, in terms of the number of victims and the overall detrimental impact on humanity. And people like Andre Vltchek are really disgusted at the way Americans have built a false religion around the 9/11 attack, as though it were the worst, most horrific massacre in all of history. "And we've got to devote the rest of our lives to shredding the Constitution and hunting down the evil perpetrators, yadda, yadda, yadda." I understand why people like Chomsky and Vltchek find that obnoxious, and I fully agree with that.

Let's move to the next slide, which is the front cover of Chomsky's reissued book on 911.

The real question is not the subtitle "Was there an alternative?" What is that supposed to mean?! The real question is, was there an alternative interpretation? Back in 2001, when it mattered the most? And of course, the answer is: not in Chomsky's book, which was a quote unquote surprise bestseller, as we see in the next slide.

Chomsky’s 9/11 really went viral. People were shocked and wanted to hear from somebody they trusted about what happened and what it meant. And Chomsky really failed in his role as a figure of guidance and wisdom for the American Left by putting out this book that's full of—I don't know if I'm allowed to say this on simulcast—total, complete bullshit. Let's look at some of it.

This book simply takes for granted, from page one on (in words like) "America's foreign victims" or "foreigners" or "foreign attack," repeated over and over, that this was an attack by foreigners on Americans. And this is repeated so many times in this book, 9/11—which consists of a series of interviews that Chomsky did in the couple of months after 911—that in the second edition, they actually had to edit these out to prevent it being overly repetitive: "Foreign attack, foreign attack, foreign attack. Foreigners, foreigners, foreigners. Americans, foreign victims." They edited out whole sections such as the section on page 67.

Over and over, we hear Chomsky say, "For the first time since the War of 1812, America has actually been attacked in its homeland. So it's not like Pearl Harbor." Totally misleading comparison! Indeed, the psychological impact was virtually identical to Pearl Harbor, as it had been scripted and designed to be.

In the second bullet point (above) Chomsky makes a very good point. The proper term would be crime. But that requires solid evidence and it opens doors to dangerous questions. To mention the most obvious one: if it's a crime, you're thinking about whodunit, right? (But listen to Chomsky): "The most obvious question is, who are the perpetrators of the crime of international terrorism condemned by the World Court 15 years before 2001?"

Wait a minute. If we should have looked at 9/11 as a crime (Chomsky's) "most obvious question" is sleight of hand: "Let's look at 15 years ago when the US was condemned in the International Court for its terrorist activities in Nicaragua." That's the most obvious question?! When there's a huge crime that changes world history, the most obvious question (according to Chomsky) isn't who did it and why. The question is, "well, what about that court case 15 years ago?" Wow. That's a very strange sentence. What kind of mind could construct that sentence? I guess a brilliant linguistic mind, I don't know.

So then third bullet point here: What about the interviewer? This is right in the first couple of pages of the book. The interviewer asks Chomsky, "Could you say something about the connivance and the role of the American Secret Service?" Could you? Well, Chomsky not only couldn't, he actually professes not to understand the question! And then he says the attack was surely an enormous shock and surprise to the intelligence services of the West. We'll see what kind of "shock and surprise" it was. Not only did we have President Bush and Bandar Bush smoking cigars to celebrate the success of the attack on the White House balcony, but we also had all sorts of reports that the intelligence services knew it was coming, and actually many of them were celebrating it afterwards. For instance, Bob Baer, former top CIA on-the-ground guy for the entire Middle East, said that he was told by a top level intelligence official that when the smoke clears, Americans will see that September 11th was a triumph for the intelligence community, not a failure. Now, what could that possibly mean: a triumph for the intelligence community? Well, it's pretty obvious they did it. They got away with it. They got what they wanted. How could you possibly construe that statement from the top of the American intelligence community in any other way? And then we have The New York Times in 2005 reporting the same thing, which we actually have heard many times.

Top CIA officials tell us that the intelligence community's handling of 9/11 was not a failure, but something, quote unquote, "good, positive, extraordinary." The top of the CIA crowing that 9/11 was "good, positive, extraordinary." This was the shock and surprise that Chomsky was trying to tell us about back in 2001?! I don't think so.

How about the next slide with Susan Lindauer, a CIA asset who was held incommunicado in solitary on a Patriot Act warrant in a US military base to keep her mouth shut. She was watching 9/11 on television and on the phone with Richard Fuisz, her CIA case officer, who was later paid a couple of million dollars in hush money, and they'd known this was coming. They knew there was going to be a huge terrorist attack on Lower Manhattan in late August or early September to be blamed on Iraq, at least as one of its purposes. And on 9/11, she's on the phone with Fuisz and he starts screaming as he watches the Towers blowing up: "The goddamn Israelis, the goddamned Israelis!" Well, he's now living in a multimillion dollar mansion in Washington, D.C. that he bought with his hush money. So that was not exactly a shock and surprise. Well, I guess it was a shock and surprise to Richard Fuisz that they went that far. But they sure knew it was coming.

Randy Glass, FBI informant, former jewel thief, got into selling fake Stinger missiles to terrorists and busting them. Stinger sting operations. Randy Glass learned from his contacts that the World Trade Center was going to be destroyed in September 2001. When he learned this in early summer 2001, he tried to do something about it. He went to Florida Senator Bob Graham's office. He was rebuffed. He ended up being steered to Colin Powell's right hand man, Mr. Francis Taylor, who you see in in the lower slide. That's Francis Taylor with his "patterns of global terrorism 2001" placard behind him. Francis Taylor picked up the phone and said, "Randy, we know about the planes that are going to hit the Towers." Now, that's very interesting because Randy Glass had never heard it was planes. He had just heard the whole World Trade Center was going to be destroyed. He didn't know how. And Francis Taylor says, you've got to keep your mouth shut about this. Don't talk to anyone about it. Don't talk to your FBI colleagues about it. Quote-unquote: "We're tiptoeing through a nuclear minefield." That was a direct quote from Francis Taylor, Colin Powell's right hand man, telling Randy Glass to keep his mouth shut about the upcoming destruction of the World Trade Center by means of planes hitting the Towers. All of this was going on in the summer of 2001.

What an enormous "shock and surprise." And then let's not even get into "Bush knew," the "bin Laden determined to attack the United States" briefing that Condoleezza Rice, who was on record saying who "could imagine such a thing," actually had to admit was given to Bush in August of 2001. And Bush snapped angrily at the briefer, "Well, you've covered your ass now." What could that possibly mean, other than they're all on board with this? What an "enormous shock and surprise to the intelligence community." It was such a shock and surprise that all kinds of important people were told not to fly on 9/11, including Willie Brown, the mayor of San Francisco, and Salman Rushdie, the famous author in hiding from the angry Muslims, whose security detail has pretty good intelligence connections. Rushdie was also told not to fly on 9/11. What an enormous shock and surprise to his security detail. We don't know where they got the word from.

And we had the Odigo instant messaging service warning that went out a couple of hours before the attacks in Hebrew, telling this Israeli based company's messaging system audience to stay out of lower Manhattan. And this is from Haaretz. It's not some kind of anti-Semitic rumor or something. It's a legitimate news story from Haaretz.

And here we have Zim Shipping Company that's half owned by the state of Israel and the other half by the Rothschilds moving out, breaking its 30 year lease at the World Trade Center. They broke that lease and lost a huge pile of money by moving out very, very quickly one week before 9/11. It certainly didn't come as a huge shock and surprise to them.

.We had, as Barbara Honegger mentioned, the Israelis set up to film the attacks before the first plane hit. Then they wildly celebrated the success of the attacks, holding up cigarette lighters and photographing and videoing themselves in front of the burning and then exploding Towers. They were found with thousands of dollars of cash in their socks. They were arrested and held for a couple of months.  They worked for Urban Moving Systems owned by Dominik Suter, who was on the FBI terror watch list and fled the country immediately after 9/11. I think he was actually wanted, but now he's back in New York. He's in at large New York state. Anyway, these guys worked for Suter and the Mossad. And there they were celebrating the attacks! They got caught, were held for two months, and then were released by Chertoff.

As Barbara said, the Dancing Israelis went back to Israel and bragged about it on Israeli TV, saying that they had been sent there, quote unquote, to "document the event." All of this was in mainstream Israeli media. Somehow it didn't seem to filter through the gatekeepers here in the United States. So it certainly didn't come as a huge shock and surprise to them. It came maybe as a sort of pleasant surprise that it worked out the way they planned, I don't know.

And in terms of shock and surprise to everybody in the intelligence community, we have Francesco Cossiga, the former Italian president, pointing out that "all the intelligence services in the US and Europe know that this attack was planned by the Mossad with the aid of the Zionist world in order to accuse the Arabic countries and launch these wars on Muslim countries." Everybody knows that. There's no shock and surprise.

It's not quite true that everybody knows it, because the intelligence world is a little bit compartmentalized and some people are very tunnel vision on their own task. But everybody in the intelligence world, above a certain level and above a certain level of sophistication certainly, does know, that's what he said. And many of them knew it back in September of 2001.

Chomsky—and this is another quote from his book 9/11—tells us that Al Qaida is so decentralized and so lacking in a hierarchical structure and so dispersed through much of the world as to be “largely impenetrable.”

We've heard this over and over: "Oh, we couldn't possibly infiltrate Al Qaida." What?! We created them! The word Al Qaida in Arabic means "database." It's the database of CIA mujahideen fighters that were basically American mercenaries. What do you mean you can't penetrate them? You created them! You have the dossier!

And here's Mohamed Heikal speaking on October 10th, 2001. Mohammed Heikal is a high level former Egyptian government civil servant who personally supervised the infiltration of Al Qaida for the Egyptian government. Among many other things, he is the Arab world's most prestigious political commentator, bar none. You see him quite often on Al Jazeera. And as he points out, "bin Laden and Al Qaida have been completely blanketed by absolute surveillance for many years, by many Western-based intelligence agencies. Obviously, they couldn't keep anything like 9/11 a secret."

Heikal isn't the only very, very high level Muslim government person pointing this out. We have General Gul, who just recently passed away, the former ISI director in Pakistan, who gave this very early interview in September 2001, in which he pointed out that Mossad and its accomplices—and he said specifically people in the US Air Force—did 9/11. And this is not a secret in Pakistan. A World Public Opinion poll shows that in Pakistan, only 3% of Pakistanis believe the official story that Arab hijackers were responsible for 9/11. 3%! The other 97% doesn't believe it.

Another great Chomsky line from his book 9/11 is: "I do not think that 9/11 will lead to a long term restriction of rights internally in any serious sense." What planet was he living on? All the rest of us, everybody that I knew, knew we were moving into Gestapo police state mode.

And today we have the son of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was murdered by a drone when he was 16. He's an American citizen, has never been accused of anything, much less convicted—like his father, who was never convicted or indicted for anything either. But they were just preemptively murdered by a drone strike.

Today, the national security state says it can kill anybody, anywhere, American citizen or no, for any reason, with no due process whatsoever. The US Constitution is a dead letter. And yet here's Chomsky telling us, "Oh no, there'll be no restrictions on anybody's rights. Of course not." I think the word wrong doesn't even begin to cover that.

Chomsky has a very interesting view of how power works in the US. It's not entirely wrong, but it leaves out some of the most important things. He says, "sure, there are barriers to the free flow of information, but they cannot be blamed on government censorship or pressure" which is "a very marginal factor in the United States."

Well, tell that to Paul Wellstone, his wife, his daughter and his campaign staff, who were all murdered because they were trying to get out some information to stop the Iraq war and to look into 9/11. And tell that to the senators who received the anthrax letters, Tom Daschle and Patrck Leahy. Daschle and Leahy were about to lead what would have been a successful effort to stop the Patriot Act. And suddenly they got anthrax in the mail. I wouldn't call that "marginal" government pressure. And it was US government anthrax, of course. Sending people anthrax is really—I think that qualifies as government pressure.

And tell that to the hundreds—well, there are 50 in the book Hit List—but there were undoubtedly hundreds of people murdered to cover up the JFK assassination. I'm told by intelligence sources (but can't confirm) that probably hundreds have also been killed to cover up 9/11, including many people here in New York (some of whom were) supposedly killed to cover up the issue of the exploding vans, the attempts to blow up the bridges and tunnels on 9/11. I don't know if that's true or not. I haven't had that fully confirmed. But in any case, murdering hundreds and hundreds of people to cover up high crimes of state—I think we could call that government pressure or censorship.

And then we have the CIA owning everybody of any significance in the major mainstream media, as we were told by former CIA Director William Colby before his unfortunate boating accident.

I wouldn't call this a marginal factor if they own everybody of any significance in the mainstream media. It is obvious that they do. Just look at the mainstream media, read two or three stories in today's New York Times. That's a marginal factor? I don't think so.

The other factors Chomsky talks about in his book Manufacturing Consent are real, too. But why is he leaving this out?

The real issue, as Chomsky said, is that 9/11 was a crime. So whodunit? And Chomsky admits in his book 9/11 that evidence (supporting the official story) is very hard to find. But nevertheless, despite the slim evidence, the "initial conclusion"— the initial conclusion that was come to a few seconds after the planes hit—this presumably correct (according to Chomsky) initial conclusion that was read to the world by Ehud Barak in a BBC studio in London just minutes after the Towers were hit (he knew when to be in the studio, didn't he?) that Al Qaida did it! And Barak gave us the whole program. The entire post-9/11 program was fed to the world through BBC by Ehud Barak in the studio! And that was the "initial conclusion." And Chomsky is telling us "it's probably correct, so let's not even doubt it."

Why would we do that? Why would we accept this official conspiracy theory that's based on "thin evidence," which is an overstatement? "Thin evidence" means there is some evidence. And in fact, there's no convincing evidence that any element of the official story is true. But let's say there's a little bit of very, very thin evidence. Why would we believe that, when the people feeding us this thin evidence are the people who benefit the most from the crime? Why is this "presumably correct"? What has Chomsky been smoking?!

And now we're moving out of his book 9/11 into some of his statements that have come thereafter, and they really haven't changed very much. He keeps repeating that there's a minuscule number of architects and engineers questioning 9/11. Well, that might have been true back in 2004 when I was doing teach-ins at the University of Wisconsin. And I would occasionally run into engineers who would debate with me and say things like, "What are you talking about? The Towers just just fell instantly. The plane hit them, the plane just destroyed their structure, and they just fell. What are you talking about?" I'd say, no, no, no. It took 45 minutes for Tower Two..." So anyway, after my conversations with architects and engineers in Wisconsin in 2004, I was afraid of going into any buildings or flying. I didn't want to be in any structures built by these people if they were that clueless.

But gradually, the architects and engineers caught up with people like me, humanities PhDs, and realized that this is completely ludicrous. It's a third grade science problem to see that none of this is even remotely physically possible. So here's Chomsky telling us that a "minuscule number," which is now up to 2500, question 9/11. Okay, glad to hear that.

Chomsky feeds us a line of BS that when you think you've discovered something, you must go through the scientific journals and publish it, peer reviewed, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Even if it's something that a third grade science student can see if they have eyes. Okay. And of course, we have more than 30 peer reviewed science 9/11 truth papers today. There are a lot of them. It just it takes years to to get through the peer review process. But the real point here is, as we see in the next slide, that what we're talking about here isn't really a scientific dispute. We're talking about people who are putting forth wings-on-pig narratives.

"If you say that, even if a pig did have wings, it still couldn’t fly, they say: 'Well, you obviously have never studied aerodynamics.' Essentially, the idea becomes that, in order to make the most obvious common sense observation about the world — pigs do not fly, bears do shit in the woods…. — you must possess multiple doctorates from M.I.T.

-Jonathan Revusky

Jonathan Revusky points out that in order to make the most obvious commonsense observations about the world, such as "pigs do not fly, bears do shit in the woods," you must possess multiple doctorates from MIT. And Chomsky repeatedly hammers on this: "What are your qualifications for noticing that a building that comes down at freefall acceleration through the path of most resistance must have had its vertical support members removed by explosives, that sort of thing?" Well, every single element of this 9/11 official myth is a wings-on-pigs narrative.

What is the official story? "Muslim hijackers hijacked flights that smashed into buildings, causing collapses. And we know this because we found evidence in Mohammad Atta's two magic suitcases that just showed up, along with the KSM torture testimony." That's the whole basis of the story! "We have these passports showing up in the rubble at two of the crash sites. We have these tortured-KSM confessions. And we have this wings-on-pigs narrative of the Osama bin Laden killing." This is a ludicrous fantasy that wouldn't pass muster with the people who are employed to check the realistic elements in Hollywood scripts.

So we hear (from Chomsky) that "there is, in fact, overwhelming evidence that the Bush administration wasn't involved in 9/11. It's very elementary evidence. You don't have to be a physicist to understand it. You just have to think for a minute."

Okay. So now Chomsky says you don't need multiple doctorates from MIT to understand his point here. What is his point? Next slide. I guess it's this: "Bush is innocent, yucky frog did 9/11."

No, no, no. Next slide.

Chomsky is telling us that this is the main point he's used over and over and over to argue that in fact it couldn't have been an inside job: "because they would have used Iraqi hijackers." So he's just taking for granted that the entire purpose of 9/11 was to launch a war on Iraq, and that there would be no way you could launch a war on Iraq based on the public relations effect of a new Pearl Harbor, like 9/11, that had hijackers from Saudi Arabia—15 of them, as well as Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon.

Now that is a very, very weak argument, to say the least. Number one, it's been disproven by history. It was very easy to launch a war on Iraq based on acts supposedly committed by Muslim patsy hijackers. The public can barely distinguish between these different Muslims. And perhaps more importantly, the purpose of 9/11 was not simply to launch the war on Iraq. The purpose of 9/11 was—well, there were many purposes. I think the biggest geostrategic purpose was to launch a 100 years war on Islam for Israel.

And we're seeing this every day. The Islamophobia that's driving all of these conflicts is the direct result of 9/11, as well as the precursors that set 9/11 up as as a conceivable reality: The false flags at (the WTC in 1993 and) the African embassies and the USS Cole, and the subsequent false flags since 9/11 to keep the pot boiling. All of this is designed to enable a permanent war uniting the entire West, especially the US, against the enemies of Israel. And of course, there are other strategic benefits as well. So this taking for granted that simply it was all about Iraq is, of course, absurd.

Chomsky tells us that it's very, very safe to question 9/11. It's risk-free. And the worst thing that could ever happen is people will laugh at you. Well, tell that to Danny Jowenko, Europe's leading controlled demolition specialist, who was caught by surprise, saying, "of course Building Seven is obvious controlled demolition. This was a really amazingly proficient team of engineers that did this. Look at how it comes straight down, straight into the ground. You know, this isn't just a controlled demolition. This is a really, really good one." And then he ends up dying in a mysterious single-car crash.

Then there's Michael Meacher, the former environmental minister in the UK. He's very, very close to the current head of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn (then in line to become Prime Minister). And Jeremy Corbyn is a 9/11 truther as well. I hope he has honest security. Because Michael Meacher, who was Jeremy Corbyn's main 9/11 truth advisor, just turned up dead overnight. He was in perfect health, no sign of any problems, and then he just turned up dead several months ago. And Corbyn had probably better watch his back as well.

Chomsky tells us that the safest thing you could do is question 9/11. Well, Michael Meacher, who put out a number of brilliant 9/11 truth pieces earlier on, then had his life threatened and shut up for a long time. But he kept advising people like Jeremy Corbyn, and is now dead.

Beverley Eckert was (alongside Bob McIlvaine) the most outspokenly pro-9/11 truth family member. The Jersey Girls right now, as you may know, are pushing the 28 pages that blame the Saudis as what Barbara Honegger called the limited hangout. Beverly Eckert wasn't down with any limited hangouts. And right after meeting with President Obama, this outspoken pro-9/11 truth family member went down in a plane crash..

This is not particularly uncommon. Other examples of plane crashes killing very large numbers of people to target one single individual include the plane crash that killed Dorothy Hunt, the wife of Howard Hunt, during the Watergate coverup of the JFK assassination. I forget how many people that one killed to get her. And we've also learned from John Perkins, the economic hitman, that his friends, the jackals and the asteroids that they send in to kill heads of state who mess with the IMF and the World Bank, are specialists in causing plane crashes. And indeed, they don't just target one person. They'll take down a whole plane full of people, just like they took down the whole plane full of Wellstone, his wife, his daughter and his campaign staff, to stop him from reopening 9/11. So again, Chomsky is wrong. This isn't necessarily the most absolutely safe thing that you could do.

Another 9/11 truth casualty was Hunter Thompson, one of America's most influential journalists. He got 9/11 right from the get-go, and he was about to try to blow it all wide open when he was suicided. And speaking of suicide, in next slide, we have Phillip Marshall with his kids, Alex and Makaila, who all died in another of these suicidings a couple of years ago. Wayne Madsen thinks that Marshall was probably killed because he had gotten information that the planes that were supposedly used on 9/11 are still parked in the Boneyard, which is a junkyard for aircraft in Arizona.

That's that's Wayne's best guess. In any case, Philip Marshall was a former CIA drug pilot who had written a couple of 9/11 Truth books. He wasn't supposed to do that.

We have a number of scholars who've had their careers prematurely terminated, including me. I lost $2 million in projected lifetime earnings by being witch hunted out of the University of Wisconsin in a way that made me permanently unemployable here in the United States. And there are several others as well. Stephen Jones was forced into early retirement. He's the guy who studied the nanothermite demolition hypothesis. He was forced out of Brigham Young University after Bush administration people went to Utah and strong-armed his superiors at that university. And Four Arrows, the co-author of American Assassination: The Strange Death of Paul Wellstone was forced out of the University of Arizona, and he's been living in exile from the United States for talking about the truth of 9/11 as well as the Wellstone assassination.  His other name is Don Jacobs, but he goes by Four Arrows. He's a very widely published and very, very wise Native American studies scholar. Also, Judy Wood was forced out of her job at Clemson. She's done unorthodox work on possible demolition modalities.

And then we just had James Tracy, another pro-9/11-truth professor, forced out of Florida Atlantic University for his discussions of what may or may not have taken place at Sandy Hook. So, again, it's not necessarily all that safe to talk about this stuff, even if you're tenured. Steve Jones and James Tracy and Four Arrows were all tenured. Three out of four of these people were tenured, and they've still been fired for going after the truth on these crimes.

It's not just that you can't talk about it and you might lose your career, might lose your job, and might lose your life, but you can't even debate it. Nobody's allowed even to SUPPORT the official story in a debate. At the University of Wisconsin, I put up a challenge: My backers offered a 1,000-dollar honorarium for anybody who would try to support the official story in a debate with me.

I've been blacklisted. I've lost my job. I was teaching at Wisconsin from 1995 to 2006 and can't teach there anymore. Well, please explain to me why I'm wrong; somebody explain why I'm wrong! And indeed, newspapers in Wisconsin editorialized that the university needs to find at least one specialist or a professor to come and explain why I'm wrong in a debate with me. And guess what? They won't do it. Not for $1,000, not for $2,000. This offer has been standing for many years, since 2010 or so. Before that it was without money. And nobody will defend the official story of 9/11, no matter how much you pay them. It's completely forbidden.

So this is not the safest thing you can do. It is an area of absolute imposed silence.

So Chomsky tells us that it doesn't matter who carried out 9/11. Now he's denied saying this, but he has said it in various words at various times. He says "even if these conspiracy theories were true, which is extremely unlikely, who cares? I mean, it doesn't have any significance." Again, this is a kind of argument that on its face, doesn't even rise to the level of being wrong, because to be wrong it has to mean something. It has to have some kind of coherence or be in some kind of discernible relationship with reality to to be wrong. And this is so bizarre, so Alice in Wonderland-ish, that you can't even say he's wrong.

But let's try to be charitable. And I will, in just a moment, suggest a way of interpreting what he may be trying to say.

In the next slide, he charges that the 9/11 truth movement is, "unique in its unwillingness to think through simple questions. Let's suppose it turns out that the World Trade Center was destroyed by a controlled demolition. Then who would the finger point to? Osama bin Laden, obviously." (laughter)

Now, I don't think you have to have seen Barbara Heidegger's deconstruction of who had security at the World Trade Center and how Building Seven was the highest security building in the United States outside of Langley, Virginia to know that this is complete gibberish.

Osama bin Laden, the guy over in the cave in Afghanistan, is going to engineer the three most sophisticated controlled demolitions of high rise buildings ever conducted in history? The tallest building ever taken down in a controlled demolition before 9/11 was about 30 stories. So Building 7, at 47 stories, was half again, maybe close to twice as tall as the tallest building ever taken down in a controlled demolition in history.

And how about the Towers? 110 stories each. These were feats of controlled demolition engineering. The idea that bin Laden and his gang of ragtag CIA mercenaries over in Afghanistan would have this kind of access to the Trade Center, and this kind of sophisticated demolition technology, is absurd on its face. And somebody as smart as Chomsky really should know that, I would think.

Next slide.

Let's give Chomsky a break here. Let's imagine: Is there any kind of reality or rationale behind some of these things that he's saying? Well, it's true that when we compare the 3,000 people killed on 9/11 to the 60 million killed abroad by the USA in acts of state terrorism since World War Two, in that case, that number of 3000 adds up to a pretty insignificant atrocity compared with all of these thousands and thousands of other atrocities.

But does that really make 9/11 insignificant?

Next slide.

Martha Stout, who is one of our leading experts on psychopathy, which is a very important topic when we study the power elite and how they operate, has cited clinical research showing that about half, a little under half, of the American population, which adds up to close to 150 million people, suffered from clinical PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) simply as a result of the TV images that they watched on 9/11. Clinical PTSD! Normally, to get clinical PTSD, you have to have been killing people in the trenches. You have to wash your blood, your buddies head blown off. You know, you had to have been through some pretty intense, nasty stuff in wartime to get PTSD. But half the American population got it from watching TV images. What does that mean? Well, that means that this was the most psychologically significant single event in the entire history of humanity, with the possible exception of the alleged crucifixion of Jesus. And I say alleged crucifixion of Jesus, because according to Muslim scholarly disputes, there's one camp that claims that according to the Koran, maybe Jesus wasn't really crucified. And there's another camp that says well, no, he probably was, but that's not the point. The point is his teachings. The point is to try to be like Jesus, not to get all freaked out about his crucifixion, whatever the truth of that may be.

The image of Jesus's crucifixion did have a profound, tremendous effect on human history, no question about it. For details, read Rene Girard.

But leaving that aside, that's the only other single event that could conceivably have had such a powerful psychological impact on the human species. So how could Chomsky be telling us 9/11 is not important? You could look at it as irony. He's saying the exact opposite of what he must really mean. What he must really mean is that it's too important. It's so cataclysmically important that we really can't deal with it. And indeed, that may be what he really thinks. I've had discussions with Andre Vltchek, Chomsky's close collaborator, about this. And Andre can't give me a clear and coherent case, but he does say that Chomsky just thinks that strategically, the best approach for stopping the bad guys and saving the world and getting justice in all of this is to do it his way, not to go through 9/11 truth. And that would imply— although Andre hasn't told me this directly—that Chomsky actually does know the truth about 9/11, and all of (what he says in public) is outrageous double talk.

I've heard that from other sources as well. There's a source in Colorado, but it's second hand, that says that Chomsky way back early on, explained that he did know that it was an inside job. So putting two and two together, maybe it's a case of his thinking that if he were to join the truth movement, he would be marginalized or worse. It wouldn't really change anything. The left that he tried to build up and become the pope of over the years wouldn't really benefit from it. Or as he said about the JFK assassination: "If this really was an inside job, they really did kill JFK, they have so much power that if we go up against them, we'll lose."

Maybe that's what he's thinking, I don't know. But I would disagree with that. As I told Andre Vltchek: Strategically, I think that if we accept the official version of 9/11, as he has, and let it go unchallenged, we're left with all of the negative effects, and we'll never get out of them. Because when you brainwash people below the level of consciousness with this paranoia switch kind of instilled fear response that Martha Stout talks about psychologically, it's all operating at an unconscious emotional level, and no amount of conscious deliberation and argumentation is ever going to change the overall body of opinion, the overall body of consciousness of the people. There's a kind of momentum that's been built up by people's being inculcated with the official picture of 9/11 that is rolling a boulder down a mountain, and all of the rational arguments you want to make about how the West commits far more terrorism anyway, all of Chomsky's way of going about this, I would argue, actually is ultimately pretty futile, because that boulder is just going to keep rolling over you and crush you.

On the other hand, if the truth about these psychologically shocking events—or, rather if the psychologically shocking truth about these kinds of events, the JFK assassination or 9/11, does, in fact, emerge, that could actually change things. I think we can accept that, say on November 23rd, 1963, if somehow the story had broken that this was a coup d'etat by the CIA and the plutocracy behind them, the American people who loved John F. Kennedy, who had completely fallen for his charisma, would have risen in revolt, and we would have had serious change. Likewise when Dr. King was murdered by the CIA, FBI and US Army snipers: Had that been fully exposed to the American people, we wouldn't have had just a few riots here and there. We would have had the whole country rising up, which is what we need. And that's precisely what would happen if, instead of giving us this line of bullshit in November of 2001, Chomsky had eloquently pushed the whole left towards just looking at Building 7 and drawing the obvious conclusions. (Had that happened) I think we would be living in a very different and vastly better world today.

And I think that this goes even for the place where we're at now. I just got a comment from one of my listeners, a very, very wise comment. He said "if we expose the full truth of 9/11 today, it won't really matter, because this unconscious inculcation of Islamophobia has been driven so deep into people that it's going to keep doing its work, even if we expose 9/11." I don't know if that's true. I certainly have seen that there are 911 truthers like Alex Jones (only more so) who are the most raving, outrageous, Islamophobic bigots that you'll ever encounter. There are people in the so called 9/11 truth movement who are actually operating robotically with their deep unconscious minds programmed to Islamophobia by /911, by the trauma response engineered through 9/11. And they see through the 9/11 hoax, but they're still acting like Islamophobic robots. They've been fully programmed at an unconscious level by 9/11, and the conscious truth doesn't help them at all. So what do we need? We need the full truth, the cognitive empirical truth. But we, of course, also need the emotional human element as well to get off this track. And I do think that exposing the mechanism, exposing the mind control mechanism, ultimately has a significant chance of stopping the mind control program.

We have this prediction by Philip Zelikow, Ash Carter, and John Deutch, made in 1998 in Foreign Affairs magazine. They're speculating about what would happen if the World Trade Center were destroyed. That's an interesting speculation in 1998! It would be "a watershed event in American history." And finally, the last sentence, most important sentence: "like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after." Philip Zelikow is a specialist in the construction and maintenance of public myths. That's his job, his self-given job description. He knows that myths are foundational narratives that create the identity of social groups. Christian identity is based on the mythic event of Jesus's life and crucifixion. So it divided time into BC and AD. Same thing with Islam. Our calendar starts with the hijrah of Prophet Muhammad, peace upon him, and there's a before, a time of ignorance, and an after. Here in the United States, the before was before the American Revolution. Then we have all these myths, heroic myths, foundational myths, about the American Revolution. And those stories divide our time into a before, the nebulous colonial world, and an after: the United States of America as we know it today.

This is how foundational myths work. Zelikow knows this. That's his specialty. He's the guy who wrote the entire 9/11 Commission Report in chapter outline before the Commission even convened, as Barbara Honegger said. And here he is in 1998, telling us what's coming: "The World Trade Center is going to be destroyed and it'll separate time into a before and an after."

We're living right now in the bellicose after. And the only way we'll ever get out of it is through full 9/11 truth at every level, both the empirical level and the deep emotional level, working out that trauma and freeing our minds from the conditioning that's led us down this horrible path towards destroying the American Constitution, propping up the most repressive forces all over the world, and engaging in these endless, futile, mindless wars of aggression all over the world. So 9/11 truth is the only the only way we're ever going to get there. And maybe someday Noam Chomsky will actually realize that. I was hoping he would show up here like Marshall McLuhan in that Woody Allen film, Annie Hall, to explain why I'm wrong. But he hasn't. So I'm going to end it here. Thank you for listening.