Democracy, International Relations Discipline, and 9/11 Truth

https://www.bitchute.com/video/HU8uB4W32NXW/

Regarding “9/11 Truth and the Silence of the IR Discipline”
David A. Hughes, First Published February 27, 2020
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0304375419898334

Bold emphasis within quotes was added by Morgan Lesko, the author of this review.

“First, there is a review of the IR literature on 9/11, showing that it fails to address 9/11 truth. Second, the key findings of 9/11 truth are presented in summary form, drawing only on the type of sources mentioned above in order to avoid charges of parochialism. Third, there is a discussion of why IR scholars ignore 9/11 truth. Finally, the conclusion considers the implications of taking 9/11 truth seriously.”
page 5

My Reactions and Favorite Quotes

Do you believe in democracy? Then this debate is relevant and worthy of your attention. The abstract of this International Relations (IR) paper does not do it justice as the ’28 pages‘ we were looking for. David Hughes has compiled a remarkable collection of the strongest 9/11 Truth evidence, and points out how little has been addressed or debunked in peer reviewed literature. In my personal experience, “9/11 Truthers” who have done more than watch a few documentaries have been familiar with most of this paper’s key claims for at least a decade.

No groups are immune to groupthink. So please, academia, steel man the open source work instead of firing professors. (p. 19) We’ve been begging you for decades. Replicate open source studies and go deeper to shut us up with stronger evidence.

“To the extent that the peer review system has worked to stifle 9/11 truth, as Wyndham alleges, it even stands to reason that some of the most important 9/11 research may not have been peer reviewed.”
page 20

“… persuading academics that 9/11 truth has validity runs up against the problem of source material. A vicious circle arises whereby (i) academics refuse to take seriously any literature that is not peer reviewed, (ii) there is scant peer-reviewed 9/11 truth literature relative to the enormity of the event, therefore (iii), academics assume that 9/11 truth is not worth taking seriously. It should be noted, however, that this is a sociological, rather than epistemological, problem.”
page 5

“Academic silence on 9/11 truth can, accordingly, be attributed to “the disciplining effect of the War on Terror and the state of emergency, which [ . . . ] is even stronger than McCarthy-era anti-communism” (van der Pijl, 2014, p. 229).”
page 19

“IR scholars, like other academics, appear to have taken their cue from President George W. Bush (2001): “Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th.” The knee-jerk reaction to anyone questioning the official 9/11 narrative is to brand them a “conspiracy theorist,” and amazingly this is true even within academia. For example, consider the following reviewer comments I received on a manuscript submitted to a different journal:

The 9/11 section is full of very dodgy information that does not stand up to even mild scrutiny. An example is the discussion of WTB7, where the author rehashes a famous discredited conspiracy theory. It is really no mystery why WTB7 collapsed (and why it was reported before the collapse). Hit by debris, and on fire for seven hours, it was eventually abandoned by firefighters, and subsequently collapsed.

These words, which parrot the official narrative and resort instinctively to the “conspiracy theory” smear, were written after the publication of the Alaska, Fairbanks, study which concludes that “fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11” (Hulsey et al., 2019, p. 2). Where is the science here and where the superstition?

As IR scholars really ought to know, the term “conspiracy theory” is weaponized. Though in use beforehand, it was systematically propagated by the CIA through the mainstream media from 1967 in order to

deflect accusations that officials at the highest levels of the American government were complicit in [President] Kennedy’s murder. [ . . . ] The CIA’s campaign to popularize the term “conspiracy theory” and make conspiracy belief a target of ridicule and hostility must be credited, unfortunately, with being one of the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time. (deHaven-Smith, 2013, p. 25)

As Falk (2007, p. 120) points out, “this management of suspicion [through the ‘conspiracy theory’ label] is itself suspicious.” To dismiss 9/11 truth as “conspiracy theory” is not only intellectually lazy, supercilious, and uninformed, it is also the hallmark of vulnerability to a long-standing psychological warfare operation. Such an approach is unbecoming of serious scholarship.
…
That tradition became weaponized in 2009 when Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, recently appointed as President Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, coauthored a paper advocating the use of anonymous government agents to engage in “cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, designed to introduce informational diversity into such groups and to expose indefensible conspiracy theories as such” (Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009, p. 205). 9/11 truth is the primary target of the paper. “Government agents (and their allies),” the authors propose, “might” enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic, or implications for action, political or otherwise” (p. 224).

Although the premises, logic, and implications of Sunstein and Vermeule’s paper are comprehensively refuted by Hagen (2011) and Griffin (2011), it is clear that there has been massive infiltration of the 9/11 truth movement by agents seeking to subvert it (see Johnson, 2011, 2017). “Interference in ongoing research,” writes Johnson (2011, p. 233), has led to “depression of the quality of discussion” and “seemingly temporary and permanent changes in the behaviour of those involved in 9/11 research.” The fracturing of the 9/11 truth movement is not accidental but, rather, the result of deliberate attempts to undermine it. Techniques used include seeding misinformation, ridiculing certain authors, promoting nonsense theories, and outright censorship (in the case of Dr. Judy Wood). Of course, if elements of the U.S. government were complicit in 9/11, then pervasive efforts by “[US] government agents (and their allies)” (Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009, p. 244) to subvert the 9/11 truth movement make sense.”
page 17

On that day, 12 miles from the Pentagon, I believed deeply in the validity of our shared institutions, but I had read a bit of Chomsky and Zinn. My first reaction was to “interpret 9/11 as “blowback,“ i.e. a violent reaction by the disenfranchised and underprivileged of the world to U.S.-led globalization (MacGregor, 2006, pp. 193–6).” (p. 18)

But this was also the age of Napster and mass-file-sharing, and I would download documentaries by the hundreds. Less than one in a hundred were questioning the war on terror. But ever since NIST released its 2005 findings, I have never been able to look away from this issue, and felt a moral obligation to start speaking up. I won middle school engineering awards in the NIST lobby, and the same institution later asked me to deny middle-school-level Newtonian physics regarding WTC7, with a side-effect of endorsing ongoing mass murder and violations of human and civil rights.

“WTC 7 was a 47-story building not hit by a plane on 9/11, yet at 5:20 p.m. that day it spontaneously descended, at freefall speed for the first 2.25 s [11], straight down into its own footprint, its roofline remaining near horizontal throughout, not damaging adjacent buildings. NIST claims that this “spontaneous collapse” was due solely to “office fires” plus a new phenomenon known as “thermal expansion”; if true, this would make WTC 7 the only large steel-framed, fire-protected building in history to have suffered such a fate [10, 14]. In reality, the only plausible explanation of WTC 7’s destruction involves the near-simultaneous failure of all 82 steel support columns (Hulsey et al., 2019). And even then, “Newton’s laws of motion and energy conservation considerations would have had to have been violated to explain that building’s total collapse within a debris pile several storeys high” (Korol et al., 2016, p. 25). How, then, was WTC 7 destroyed, by whom, and to what end?”
page 8

Obstruction of Justice

I self-censored [with fear of patriotic fervor] for years before sharing my real thoughts with my family and closest friends. By the time Obama chose his cabinet, my hopes were dashed regarding imperial trends and The Patriot Act. Then I started trying to warn everybody that he had to dismantle the emerging tyrant’s toolbox… “Even if you trust Obama, what about the future presidents?” We couldn’t have imagined a scarier reveal when Trump inherited the most powerful totalitarian starter kit in recorded history. Nonetheless, “the “establishment-left,” to borrow MacGregor’s (2006, p. 194) apt term,” (p. 18) seems to been openly pressuring institutions to employs more methods of population control being tested by China and variations on medical martial law.

Hopefully this broader context of our shared reality can help you forgive my evidence-based concerns. All most “conspiracy theorists” ever wanted was help figuring out what actually happened with a generational-defining, transforming event. As a society, and species, we cannot afford to naively look away from crimes on ever grander scales.

“Legal responsibility for verifying the U.S. claim to self-defense, even if only retrospectively, rests with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United Nations (UN). However, both organizations “accepted without hesitation the American claim to have been attacked by elements of international terrorism” and continue to do so (Benjamin, 2017, p. 373). 1

Academia has followed suit. Despite the gigantic volume of academic literature on 9/11, “almost all such studies assume the correctness of the core US claim of self-defence and then proceed to nibble on issues lying around its perimeter” (Benjamin, 2017, pp. 374–375). Thus, debates revolve around the appropriate relationship between civil liberties and security, whether or not to treat 9/11 as an act of war or a crime, the ethics of torture and drone warfare (implicitly assuming the War on Terror itself to be just), and so on. Particularly in the International Relations (IR) literature, including the security studies and terrorism literature, there is little to no suggestion that 9/11 may have been a false flag operation 2 used to provide the pretext for illegal wars of aggression and domestic repression.

Prima facie, this seems odd given the long and well-documented history of false flag terrorism. In 1931, for example, … “
page 2

“1. In the case of North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the legal basis for invoking Article 5 of the Washington Treaty in order to invade Afghanistan appears to have been a U.S. State Department dispatch instructing allies how to present the official 9/11 narrative and not forensic evidence demonstrating that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated from abroad (Harrit, 2018).”
page 24

“If it could be shown that 9/11 was a false flag, the implications would be of revolutionary significance. It would mean that the U.S. government, or at least a criminal cabal within it, knowingly committed mass murder against its own population and lied to the world about it in order to launch imperialist wars and crack down on domestic dissent. The U.S. government would then appear as a tyranny, and according to the Declaration of Independence, the American people would have the right to overthrow it. 4”
page 3

This relates to my biggest current problem with the blanket denial of 9/11 Truth questions. Until more open source evidence comes to light, the best existing evidence points to a coup of the institutional power, presumably by rogue factions within the national-security-centered deep state (a subset of the military-intelligence-industrial-complex). But the American public does not behave as if these are more accurate and actionable conclusions regarding our shared reality. Instead of investigating the intelligence agencies for deceiving the country into ongoing wars, many unquestioningly trust the claims driving public discourse — and dismiss valid questions as ‘conspiracy theory’. The human costs of this behavior is staggering.

After Democracy Now stopped referring to them as the “alleged hijackers”, and then Obama later failed to change course, my activist genes got me publicly involved. I participated in public education with We Are Change chapters in Maryland/DC an the San Francisco Bay Area.

2009–10 educational street actions with We Are Change chapters from San Francisco & East Bay.

Demonstrating exactly what free-fall speed looks like.

This is how we felt labelled. These days it’s more of the continued social ridicule, plus de-platforming, de-monetizing, and shadow-banning on social media.

“Psychologically, 9/11 truth can generate a sense of ontological insecurity as those waking up to it realize that key propositions that they have been socialized to accept are false. As one U.S. academic writes, questioning the official 9/11 narrative means that “everything changes.” Possible changes include:

loss of belief and trust in government; loss of belief in the value of democratic participation; loss of belief in my own tradition as a bearer of “civilization”; loss of belief in the power of dialogue and compromise as a basis of civil society; loss of belief in openness and transparency in public policy; loss of faith in my democratically elected government to act on values and principles compatible with my own, etc. (Smith, 2012, p. 348)

As the language of loss indicates, this is a lot for anyone to come to terms with, and too much for many Westerners to deal with, at least to begin with.”
page 19

If you support representative governance, then you should support honest investigations into 9/11. Doing so is a prerequisite for millions of potential voters to truly invest in the established governmental institutions again.

Banning ‘conspiratorial thinking’ from social media won’t make us go away. It will only deepen the divides, and the establishment narratives will become even more ignorant of the evidence which exists for alternative claims. And remember that in the shoes of fellow laypeople in other countries, one would naturally have fewer hang-ups about looking at coups in America.

No matter what kind of novel event 9/11 was, and whether or not there was in fact some novel coup, there are ample omissions and deceptions coming out of the established collection of intelligence agencies. The consequences of this performance demand accountability.

We are still incapable of giving informed consent with our votes. For example, United States citizens aren’t allowed to understand the most significant events from two presidents ago, one presidential assassination ago, and most ongoing aspects of the National Security State.

“However, the longer that time goes on, and more people around the world come to understand that there is something deeply suspect about the events of 9/11, the more inexcusable it becomes for academics to continue to turn a blind eye to those events. The burden of proof today is on academia to defend the official narrative against the allegations that have been made against it. This requires engaging with 9/11 truth rather than ignoring it.

Should academics prove unable to defend the official narrative, several major consequences would follow. First, the possibility that 9/11 was a false flag would have to be taken seriously.
…
Second, an inability to defend the official narrative would necessitate reflection on why that narrative has for so long been uncritically accepted among scholars who pride themselves on their ability to think critically. Certainly, they should not be taken in by far-fetched conspiracy theories such as the one put forward by the Bush administration. 11 … In that respect, academia would stand deeply discredited.”
page 21

Do you want society to keep valuing evidence-based peer reviewed research? I do. But when these methods and systems are misused to bully intellectually honest evidence outside a paradigm or consensus, it does significant long-term damage to these deeper goals of all such institutions.

“Yet, recent developments suggest that 9/11 truth is increasingly a force to be reckoned with. In 2016, two U.S. presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Jill Stein, publicly cast doubt on the official 9/11 narrative, with Stein going so far as to call for a new investigation — a tacit recognition of the fact that many U.S. citizens do not believe the official narrative. 6 On September 11, 2018, the findings of a 6-year inquiry by the international 9/11 Consensus Panel were published: The panel comprises 23 expert reviewers and follows the scientific best evidence consensus model (Griffin & Woodworth, 2018). In November 2018, the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan announced that he would refer the findings of a report by the nonprofit Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry to a federal Grand Jury. In July 2019, with the Grand Jury proceedings apparently stalling, the Board of Fire Commissioners of the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District in New York passed a resolution calling for “a comprehensive federal grand jury investigation and prosecution of every crime related to the attacks of September 11, 2001.” In September 2019, a 4-year inquiry by a team at the University of Alaska Fairbanks into the destruction of World Trade Centre Building 7 (WTC 7) culminated in a 126-page report, concluding, “fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST [the National Institute of Standards and Technology] and private engineering firms that studied the collapse” and “the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building” (Hulsey et al., 2019, p. 2). Now would seem an opportune moment for academics to begin taking 9/11 truth seriously.
…
This begs the question of why the U.S. government was so unwilling to support a proper investigation into the events of 9/ 11 and why its eventual report, like the NIST reports of 2005 and 2008, lacks credibility. Fifty-one key claims made in those reports are systematically tested against best evidence in the investigation conducted by the 9/11 Consensus Panel and found to be unsupportable (Griffin & Woodworth, 2018; see also Ryan, 2007).”
page 3

The Frequently Asked Questions That Have Long Demanded Answers… Now Demand Peer Reviewed Answers

Mr. Hughes explicitly calls out academia to finally address a number of discrepancies with the official narrative. “In that respect, it is hoped that the academic community will finally pick up the gauntlet thrown down by the 9/11 truth movement.” (p. 8) For more detailed evidence related to these questions, you might start with The 9/11 Best Evidence Panel’s, Consensus Points.

“There are certain key propositions that the large majority of 9/11 truth researchers would agree on, which academics would do well to start considering. Some of these points are given below. Most can be found in the results of the 9/11 Consensus Panel investigation (Griffin & Woodworth, 2018), which took 23 experts 6 years to agree upon, requiring an 85% consensus rate.
…
The 2008 NIST report on the destruction of WTC 7, for example, published 7 years after the War on Terror began, “has all the earmarks of attempted scientific fraud” (Wyndham, 2017, p. 3). Academics therefore have a scientific as well as a moral responsibility to investigate 9/11.”
page 7

“But if not planes and office fires, what did destroy the Twin Towers?
…
If a gravity-driven collapse was not the mechanism by which the Twin Towers were destroyed, what was?
…
Although massive amounts of energy were released in the process, evident in the initial dust cloud formation (see Figures 3 and 5) as well as the rapid expansion of the dust clouds to envelop the whole of lower Manhattan, no light was generated and the dust clouds were cool. What could have caused this?
…
the 0.7 and 0.9 Richter scale readings said to correspond, respectively, to the plane impact shocks on WTC 2 and WTC 1 occur before the radar-based impact times of the planes and are too low in frequency to correspond to plane impacts [8]. These signals require explanation.
…
How, then, was WTC 7 destroyed, by whom, and to what end?” (p. 8)
…
“Numerous eyewitness reports, including from those present within the buildings, testify to large explosions and destruction of the basement/lobby areas of WTC 1, WTC 2, and WTC 7 prior to the total disintegration of those buildings [1, 9, 17]. This, too, warrants further investigation.
…
there is no credible photographic or eyewitness evidence showing any of the alleged hijackers preparing to board any of the four planes involved [41, 42]. Given that there were over 300 security cameras at Dulles International Airport alone, this anomaly requires explanation.” (p. 10)
…
“All of this is consistent with the use of patsies and doubles (simulated identities) in covert intelligence operations, pointing to the need for more 9/11 research along these lines.
…
Links between Al-Qaeda and U.S. intelligence need to be researched further in the 9/11 context.” (p. 11)
…
“More research into the life and death of bin Laden is needed.
…
A full investigation into the 9/11 war games is therefore required.” (p. 12)
…
“How, then, was a successful attack on the Pentagon possible in the first place?
…
The role of senior U.S. military officials during 9/11 therefore requires further explanation and justification.
…
Coupled with the missing airport CCTV footage of the alleged hijackers and the FBI’s role in (mis)identifying them, research needs to be carried out into the possibility that the FBI was at the forefront of a cover-up.
…
The role of the Secret Service on 9/11 warrants further investigation.
…
In particular, thyroid cancer incidence is 2–3 times higher in WTC responders, firefighters, and New York City Department of Health exposed residents than in cancer registries generally (van Gerwen et al., 2019, p. 1600). The reasons for this cannot be explained by asbestos in the towers or by overdiagnosis owing to physician bias (van Gerwen et al., 2019, pp. 1602–1604) and therefore need to be properly investigated.” (p .13)
…
“Further research is needed into Giuliani’s role in 9/11 (including the expedited clean-up operation) as well as official foreknowledge of the destruction of WTC 1, WTC 2, and WTC 7.
…
The reports by FEMA (2002), the 9/11 Commission (2004), and NIST (2005 and 2008) are known to be riddled with inaccuracies, omissions, and distortions. … These reports are widely regarded as cover-ups in the 9/11 truth community, and their unreliable, perhaps fraudulent, status stands in need of explanation.
…
Questions need to be asked as to why senior officials were rewarded, not punished, for their failures on 9/11.
…
These studies, which have not been challenged, demand further investigation into insider trading based on foreknowledge of 9/11.
…
There needs to be a full investigation into this missing money, especially in view of recent research indicating that an estimated US$21 trillion cannot be accounted for in the financial records of the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development between 1998 and 2016 (Skidmore & Fitts, 2019).” (p. 14)
…
“Further investigation is needed into the extraordinary good fortune of “Lucky Larry.”
…
The official account of what happened to the four planes’ black boxes cannot be trusted [25].
…
Indeed, this extraordinary [Boeing 767] trajectory still requires a plausible explanation.
…
CNN reported on the imminent destruction of WTC 7 for over an hour before it happened; MSNBC knew in advance that the building would come down; and the BBC reported 23 minutes prematurely that WTC 7 had already collapsed (with the building still standing in the background of the report) [16]. How did these news organizations obtain foreknowledge of the event? Why were they so keen to report what their sources were telling them instead of asking critical questions, such as how a steel-framed building could “collapse” in the first place? Why did the BBC not even bother to check that WTC 7 had in fact been destroyed?” (p. 15)

Reactions To This Paper

As of mid-April, good luck finding ANY news coverage on this new paper. But here are a couple of reactions thus far:

“Before the day was over, the journal’s editor, Lacin Idil Oztig, tweeted a screenshot of her statement defending the journal’s handling of the article. She bravely asked readers to stop attacking the editorial board members and insisted that full responsibility for the article belonged to her and the author.”
“Peer-Reviewed Journal Publishes Article on Academic Resistance to 9/11 Truth. Outright Hostility Ensues.”, March 9, 2020, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth

“My view is that the approach of these academics on Twitter is indefensible. They smear the author and the paper while seeking to intimidate the publisher and send a public message that this topic ought to remain off-limits to any critical inquiry. The fact that the paper is seeking to reflect on how that taboo comes to be maintained is scarcely commented on by the critics.”
“Peer Review Vs Trial By Twitter”, March 8, 2020, by Tim Hayward

Conclusion

American reactions were based on deeply inaccurate information, by several orders of magnitude. “Weapons of mass destruction” were not the only deceptions.

Due to inadequate skepticism toward expert authorities, “total deaths during the post-2001 U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen is likely to reach 3.1 million or more — around 200 times the number of U.S. dead.”

.
The event’s trauma was a prerequisite for Americans to passively allow endless wars of terror or humanitarianism, and a blooming police state. Please friends, do not trivialize these human costs of our collective blind spots, buck up, and deal with the cognitive dissonance required to integrate new evidence into your world views (learning). ❤

The chasm growing between reality bubbles continues to expand, which is a serious risk to society and safety. We have long lived in a post-truth world and small but significant subsets of the population have been aware, while most have not. We’re already trapped in the upside-down, and we need to work together to get out of the real dilemmas we share.

Many of us have at least seen 9/11 Truth as one path to end the endless wars which have killed millions. Many of us see it as perhaps the only way to wake up the bi-partisan consensus that The Patriot Act is totally worth the extra security theater it provides. Most of us see this movement as an honest search for truth against the mass murderers who have gotten away with their crimes for nearly two decades, on the loose in our shared world.

If we’re not living under tyranny, then there are always valid reasons to challenge governmental claims to emergency powers. If not for your own protection, you must help stop this trend before it harms more of ‘the others’ whom it has already harmed.