via GlobalResearch.ca: James Corbett talks to Michael Welch of the Global Research News Hour about 9/11 Truth at 20 years old and the transition from Homeland Security to biosecurity.
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES (courtesy of GlobalResearch.ca) – podcast embed at end.
Michael Welch for Global Research: Your interest in 9/11 Truth started a few years ago after the event. Might I ask what specifically about this event left you convinced that the official story was flawed?
James Corbett: In order to understand the effect of discovering the fraud of the event, I have to return to the day itself and the events and the way they played out. And, like I imagine much of the public on that day, I rather unquestioningly accepted a lot of what I was being told and what was being shown to us, with a growing sense of unease about the ways that 9/11 was clearly being used as a political bludgeon on the geopolitical stage in order to enact a war agenda that obviously started to rankle. But any suggestion that there was anything untoward with the events themselves seemed to me outlandish conspiracy theory.
Which is interesting, because, of course, growing up I had been willing to question all sorts of things. I did not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nut, or those sorts of things. But in this particular event— perhaps because of the trauma of the events themselves, and the way they were presented—I found it difficult to go there.
It wasn’t until the fifth anniversary of 9/11 that I started to encounter information online that at least got me questioning. And I wish I could identify the single “silver bullet,” as it were, that got me there. But I think it was more of a series of assertions that I was encountering in online documentaries about, for example, suggestions that Osama Bin Laden was meeting with American intelligence in a hospital in Rawalpindi before 9/11 and things like this, which sounded outlandish to me. Outlandish enough that I decided to look up, “Well, is that true?” And then I could determine for myself: “Oh, that was reported by French intelligence in the summer of 2001.” [CORRECTION: the American hospital in Dubai]
Or I heard about Operation Northwoods, a Joint Chiefs of Staff-authorized plan to commit terror attacks in the United States with casualties in order to blame that on Cuba. In order to justify an invasion of Cuba. I thought that sounded absolutely, staggeringly outlandish until I looked it up and saw the declassified documents for myself.
It was really that process of starting to not just encounter assertions of the information but actually looking up the documents underlying that information that got me interested in independent media generally. I mean, I wouldn’t be here doing this today if it wasn’t for that experience that I had around the fifth anniversary of 9/11.
GR: Myself as well. I know that the 9/11 Commission report, which contains a lot of information that’s in doubt, based on what you know about that report, what should the average listener think about as one of the most damning aspects of the official statement?
JC: I think, for me, one of the statements that has always stuck out for me was the statement on terrorist financing, where, ultimately, they conclude that, “Whatever the source is of the money trail here, it’s not that important.” Something to that effect. I’ve quoted the actual line from the commission report—which I have sitting behind me—many times because it’s just so staggeringly, on-its-face ridiculous. The idea of a criminal investigation basically not interested in the money trail is a gigantic sign that they were not interested in investigating this at all. There have been many explorations of the staggering failures of the 9/11 Commission even from a mainstream perspective. You had Philip Shenon and then others who have written about the 911 Commission report and its many shortcomings.
One of the facts that I think spells it out most clearly is the fact that Philip Zelikow, who was appointed to be the executive director of the commission and essentially was running the commission—the chairmen were more figurehead positions, the executive director was the person who was dealing with it, hiring the commission staff, directing them, telling them what to write about, and then ultimately organizing the final report—not only did all of that work, but, as Phillip Shenon reported in his (I think) 2008 book on the 9/11 Commission, Zelikow and one of his partners had, at the very beginning of the entire investigation, before the commission staff had even met a single time, written the entire complete outline of the final report of the 9/11 Commission. Not only including chapter titles, not only including headings, not only including subheadings, but sub-subheadings. Every single part of the 9/11 Commission final report, which is the official story of 9/11, was already baked into the cake before the 9/11 Commission even began meeting.
So that should tell you what you really need to know about the reliability of that report. There are many many many other points to be made besides there, but I think that gives you the flavour of just how reliable that investigation really was.
GR: A lot of the information came out of…torture was a way of getting information from …
JC: Another extremely important point. I can’t remember off the top of my head, but it was over four hundred of the footnotes, a full one third or one quarter of the footnotes in the 9/11 Commission report sources back to CIA-extracted torture testimony from a few key eyewitnesses or key participants or at least alleged participants.
The testimony, which would not be admitted in any court—and in fact that’s exactly what the continued, ongoing, never-ending circus trial that isn’t taking place in Guantanamo right now with regards to KSM, the so-called mastermind of 9/11 and his alleged co-conspirators, that’s the reason why in the 15, 16, 17 years they’ve been trying to bring that case, they still haven’t even been able to do that, even in a military kangaroo court, because the testimony was extracted via torture. And when that was discovered and the evidence of those torture testimony sessions, the waterboardings and others, the video evidence that existed, was ordered, ordered by a court judge to be preserved, the CIA went and erased it anyway. So, that again, gives you a flavour of where this actual “final word” on what happened on 9/11 really comes from.
GR: You know, the state of 9/11 Truth today, it seems to be almost completely absorbed in the explanation of the collapsing towers, particularly World Trade Center 7. But there used to be numerous other warnings outlined by Daniel Hopsicker, Kevin Fenton, Paul Thompson, and of course Michel Chossudovsky, but that stuff is treated like icing. The proof of controlled demolition of the towers is the cake, OK? Some of the older and wiser people in organizing have tended to reject that kind of argument base because it’s essentially speculative at its core. They prefer evidence about suppressed warnings and use of the CIA in deliberately telling the FBI about its activities, as the physical evidence arguments tend to dominate discussion, the financing, the numbers of activists. Some of the 9/11 Truth crowd have essentially thrown up their hands and walked away from the movement. But what are your thoughts about that, James? I mean, do you really think that stressing physical evidence from the site will get you anywhere in the courts?
JC: That’s actually been a particular bugbear of mine almost since the beginning of my exploration into 9/11 Truth. I noticed, even at that time—in 2006, 2007, the very early days—whenever I would bring up the topic, or even try to explore the topic with other people in real life, the thing they would say is, “Yeah, I saw that video on YouTube of the different explosions in the towers.” Something along those lines. It would always boil down to the towers, at best, or maybe the Pentagon, or some other aspects of the explosive fireworks of that day. And I do not dismiss for one second the importance of investigating that. I think it is an important piece of what happened. But if we reduce 9/11 Truth down to the explosive events that happened on that day, and that’s all we talk about, that’s all we investigate, that’s all we look at, then, for me, it’s just a firework show. It’s just a pyrotechnic event. It has no meaning and no consequence if we reduce 9/11 Truth down to that.
Because at base, for me, 9/11 Truth is not about the day of Tuesday September 11th 2001 from 8:55 a.m. to 11 a.m. or whatever time frame we set there. No, this was a, at the very least—as one of the 9/11 Commissioners himself admitted to, I believe, We Are Change LA, over a decade ago—this was the result of a twenty-year conspiracy, which one would assume he’s talking about the origins of what eventually became al-Qaeda in the Soviet-Afghan war and things along those lines. And if it was at least a 20-year conspiracy to bring those events about, it has since played out over 20 years in various permutations for various political agendas.
And if we reduce all of that, all of that history, all of those extremely important points down to, “It was some explosions that happened in a building,” then we miss the absolute core of what 9/11 really signified and the way that it’s being used. And then we miss the actual importance of those events for the events that we are living through now with regards to the current crisis, when we’re looking at the COVID crisis. We cannot understand this unless we understand the greater paradigm that was operative, not just on the day of 9/11, but that was opened up by recourse to the events of 9/11.
GR: For sure. I definitely agree with you. I mean I think that the evidence is pretty strong about the controlled demolition. But I mean you only have a sliver of thought encapsulating this basically grand spectrum of activities.
In his 2006 essay lamenting the misdirection of 9/11 activism on the 5th anniversary, Emmanuel Sferios states the following:
The basic idea is to control both sides of the debate, and frame it in a way that makes the opposing side ineffective (not necessarily unbelievable). In the end it doesn’t matter whether even a majority of the people believe the US government was complicit in 9/11 (this is already the case). What matters is only that the perpetrators can never successfully be prosecuted. Thus they pollute the body of evidence with red herrings and false lines of inquiry.
That bring us forward to 20 years after 9/11. Spike Lee was forced to excise the meat of his production, which featured architects and engineers and 9/11 family members challenging the official story. Regardless, do you see any promise of a 9/11 breakthrough 20 years later or has success been driven even further into the mud of confusion?
JC: If the proof of the pudding is in the eating then I would just ask anyone out there in the crowd to taste the fruits of the 9/11 Truth tree. And what has it actually provided? Certainly no prosecutions. Certainly nothing tangential in that way. Not even really the derailing of any of the key political agendas that have played out. And now it is at the point where 9/11 is not even a touchstone that the politicians will bring out anymore in order to justify their agendas. That really does seem like yesterday’s news. So, the idea that 9/11 Truth is going to have some sort of breakthrough at this point seems highly unlikely.
I would never, ever dissuade anyone from pursuing whatever line of investigation and truth-seeking that they’re interested in. And certainly if you go into that, go into it with the intention of making a difference and making a breakthrough. Yes. One hundred percent. But I am not holding my breath waiting for that.
I think, for me, the one real victory that I can identify with regards to the 9/11 Truth movement over the last twenty years was the introduction into public discourse of the idea of false flag terrorism. And I can attest to this from my own perspective being someone who, if you had confronted me with that idea twenty years ago, I would have responded as I think most of the public has responded, for the past couple of decades: “But why would the government attack itself?” It’s such a bizarre notion to the average person. They can’t even process what the political dynamics would be. “Why would this happen? That doesn’t make any sense!”
I have matured in my thinking over the past couple of decades. And I do think that the general public is now much more aware of the idea of false flag terrorism. Why it would be perpetrated, for what purpose and the idea that it could happen. Obviously, there’s still a large degree of debate and skepticism among the public that it does happen, or that it was implemented on 9/11 itself.
But even having that idea in the public consciousness is actually valuable because I’ve often likened it to a magic trick. If the crowd doesn’t know that there’s the rabbit up the sleeve, then it seems amazing when it happens and they just tend to believe it. But if you know that there is a rabbit up the sleeve, you’ll be looking for that rabbit. You will be less likely to believe when suddenly the rabbit appears from the hat. “Oh! How did that happen? I can’t imagine.”
Well, once you have that in your mind, you can at least start to process it. And I think that is an important step forward for truth-seeking generally and also for the derailing of the political agendas that are brought about through false flag events. The sort of wisening of the public to the idea that that exists is a significant victory.
GR: Most people, I think, might want to apply these lessons of 9/11 Truth to the pandemic or the “scamdemic” or the “COVID Conspiracy” whatever you want to call it. I mean, first of all there are similarities – I mean they’re both “conspiracy theories” right? They call you a conspiracy theorist either way. Can I get you to talk about other similarities and talk about the differences between 9/11 Truth and COVID Truth?
JC: I think the similarities, for anyone who is already familiar with 9/11 Truth, I think the similarities tended to jump out. And I have catalogued and talked about that quite specifically. I released something on the 19th anniversary of 9/11 last year called “COVID 9/11: From Homeland Security to Biosecurity” where I attempted to detail those connections and the similarities and what makes these events comparable. Not even comparable, but actually part of a continuous fabric.
And within that I pointed—for example, I mean we can talk about it in generalities of Homeland Security and Biosecurity and that sort of thing—but we can look at very specific examples. Like the case of CLEAR, which was a company that as Caryn Seidman-Becker who was an executive at CLEAR who was interviewed in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic on CNN, talking about “Oh, what can we do now? Let’s start implementing all sorts of new security procedures.” The CEO of this company company called CLEAR was brought on to talk about their work with regards to COVID.
And she started by saying “CLEAR was born out of 9/11 and it was about a public-private partnership leveraging innovation to enhance homeland security and delight customers.” Imagine saying that with a straight face. Anyway, and then she says, “And that was really the beginning of screening 1.0. And just like screening was forever changed post-9/11, in a post-COVID environment you’re going to see screening and public safety significantly shift.”
And that’s when she goes into her spiel, touting CLEAR Health Pass, which is now being adopted by more and more – I mean, the Phoenix Coyotes in the U.S. and other places are starting to adopt this. It is an app that can be downloaded that can have your various details and your vaccination record, etc.
It is screening 2.0, to use Caryn Seidman-Becker’s analogy there. And if 1.0 was the terrorism / Homeland Security version that was at the airports specifically for international travel, 2.0 is becoming more invasive and now it’s in order to attend a public event, in order to eventually leave your home. Although that idea would have sounded outlandish a little while ago, it isn’t at this point.
So I think there’s a direct continuity, identifiable documentable continuity, between the two agendas. But the person who has articulated that the most clearly in my mind is Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher who has written and talked extensively about this crisis and where it’s coming from. And I have cited him often for giving me that word: Biosecurity.
He wrote an excellent, very concise little piece called “Biosecurity and Politics” towards the beginning of this entire crisis that really well articulated that concept. But in this book, of his that was recently released, called Where are We Now?, he really brings this out in a way that I think is extremely important to understand.
He says:
We are experiencing the end of an era in the political history of the West, the era of bourgeois democracy founded on constitutions, on rights, on parliaments, and on the divisions of power. This model was already facing a crisis: constitutional principles were increasingly being ignored, and the executive power had almost entirely replaced the legislative by operating—as it now does exclusively—through legislative decrees.
With the so-called pandemic, things went further: what American political analysts called the “Security State”—which was established in response to terrorism—has now given way to a health-based paradigm of governance that we term “biosecurity.”
It is important to understand that biosecurity, both in its efficacy and in its pervasiveness, outdoes every form of governance that we have hitherto known. As we have been able to see in Italy—but not only here—as soon as a threat to health is declared, people unresistingly consent to limitations on their freedom that they would never have accepted in the past.
We are facing a paradox: the end of all social relations and political activity is presented as the exemplary form of civic participation.
Obviously referencing the social distancing paradigm and the incredible shut down of political dissent that we’ve seen in the COVID era, in every form and in every sense. And I think we really have to understand and internalize what Agamben is pointing out here. This is not at base some sort of “public health emergency” that’s taking place in some sort of decontextualized manner. What we are experiencing is a changeover in the paradigm of governance on the planet. And what differentiates this changeover from a lot of others is it is truly global in nature, and instantaneous.
We can look at previous changeovers in governance from feudalism to mercantilism and other sorts of changeovers that have happened in the past that took place over a period of decades if not centuries and involved different, took different forms in different countries at different times. But we’re watching an almost simultaneous rollout of a new governance paradigm throughout the world right now based on biosecurity.
And anyone who thinks that that is simply going to disappear when this pandemic is declared over truly does not understand what we’re living through right now. And I think that that to me contextualizes what 9/11 was about, which was the institution of this new form of governance, the “security state” which enabled all sorts of legislation and other things that gave more, centralized more power in the hands of the executive. Well now we’re seeing the complete take-over with regards to the biosecurity state and literally the limitation and control of each individual and their participation in society.
GR: Yeah. For certain. I mean I can’t imagine any other way that you can just, you know, shut down economies like that if we did it through, I don’t know, democratic processes.
After 20 years, you know since 9/11, the deep state or secret governments have learned how to adapt to 9/11 skeptical thinking. They expect the people to be more distrustful of government and media. When someone cooks another scheme hidden by media, the reaction is to label it a conspiracy theory and say they are getting information – they’re getting it from internet con-artists or something like that to the extreme of even developing conspiracy sites clandestinely. So that is the confusion of our time 20 years later.
Q Anon for example, I suspect, is most likely something cooked up by the State. ProporNot featured the release of the names of sites and groups that ask too many of the wrong questions. They’re Kremlin agents essentially.
The point is that this is part of the interpretation of the changing times. Don’t hide the conspiracy. Instead bury it in an avalanche of conspiracy theories. Would you agree to that?
JC: Yes! Not only would I agree to that, but I think even the WHO and other prestigious world bodies would agree to that!
For example, we saw the attempt at the beginning of this crisis to float the idea of an “infodemic” which was the term that was – I believe it actually was originated a couple of years before the crisis – but they really started trying to push this idea just as this was starting to take off internationally in the media. There is an infodemic of misinformation and disinformation that’s being perpetuated online. And that very quickly morphed into calls for censorship.
And I think what we’re experiencing is not new in the larger historical sense. I think one of the ways that power functions in society is powerful interests and groups wage information warfare on their subject populations. That’s been true throughout history. But to deny that that is taking place now, especially, is lunacy, I would say. It’s becoming not just evident but explicit in, for example, the censorship that is now taking place online.
But there’s a second flank to that movement, as you indicate, which is, yes, of course there’s the outright censorship and the draconian attempt to control the conversation, but the people who have spent decades if not centuries studying humans and their reactions know that there will be resistance, there will be skepticism, there will be a certain percentage of the public who is likely to, for example, question 9/11 and, for example, question COVID. And what can be done in response to that?
Well, there have been in the past there have been people who have talked quite explicitly about possible responses to that. Like Cass Sunstein who will be familiar to people who have been involved in 9/11 Truth research, as a Harvard Law Professor slash the person who became Obama’s regulatory czar in 2009. In 2008, he wrote a paper on “Conspiracy Theories” – he co-authored the paper – in which he actively advocated for the government to at least consider using undercover operatives to go into conspiracy communities in order to undermine their “crippled epistemology” and to introduce government talking points into those communities, and other such things.
As I pointed out in a recent editorial, although many people have pointed out time and time again the horrific nature, the totalitarian mindset that that emerged from and that idea of putting out government propaganda through covert means as a way of trying to undermine the idea that government engages in covert operations against its citizens which is on its face a contradiction. But beyond that, as I pointed out in my editorial, actually its even more insidious than that, because by introducing this idea of “cognitive infiltrators” (as he called them) going into conspiracy community discussions undercover, he has then introduced into the debate, in conspiracy circles of, “Well, anyone who doesn’t agree with me is clearly a cognitive infiltrator, and you’re working for the government” And suddenly—as we have I think demonstratively seen in the 9/11 Truth space, it’s undeniable at this point—it has devolved into warring factions who have become marginalized and then further marginalized and further further marginalized themselves into smaller and smaller groups in which “everyone who doesn’t agree with me is a cognitive infiltrator!” and that’s all that people are interested in talking about.
So unfortunately, I mean, we’ve seen how the Warren Commission skepticism was undermined by even the introduction of the phrase “conspiracy theory” through CIA memo 1035-960 I believe it is off the top of my head. And people can look into that history or the ways that for example the CIA were admittedly planting agents within district attorney, Jim Garrison’s investigation in order to feed him misinformation and report back to Langley about what was going on in that investigation. So these types of operations have been underway for a very long time—how to undermine skeptics and people who are trying to inquire, and potentially going to bring prosecution against the actual perpetrators of these events.
Unfortunately, that means they’ve had half a century to fine-tune these various techniques and, unfortunately, I think we already seen signs that it’s working quite well, even in the conspiracy space, as people start again to further and further marginalize themselves, retreat into certain dogmatic positions about what they believe is happening right now. And then, not willing to work with or in any way engage with people who don’t agree every single point about what I think is happening right now. And people are starting to limit themselves into these little boxes.
And then there’s, on top of that, the absolute flood of information and infodemic that is demonstrably taking place every single day. There’s a thousand new stories that are pertinent to what’s happening right now that no one person could possibly keep on top of all by themselves, and that is absolutely overwhelming.
And put on top of that, not only the health concerns that people have at this time but the mental health concerns about isolation, and lockdowns and all of these things, the way they’re affecting people. I won’t say that we’ve never seen such outright levels of total all encompassing warfare on the population through every vector before, but you’d be hard pressed to find one in which it has been so relentless and so long-lasting as this one has already been. And we’re only a year and a half into this.
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James Corbett Talks 9/11 and Biosecurity on the Global Research News Hour