Posted on 05/14/2003 10:40:17 AM PDT by NorthernRight
May. 11, 2003. 08:25 AM
Conspiracy crusader doubts official 9/11 version
MICHELE LANDSBERG
Barrie Zwicker gazes calmly into the camera, hands clasped, voice clear and resonant, looking the quintessential Canadian progressive: a colourful knitted vest over an open-collared shirt, a neat little beard, a personality that radiates boyish, almost naive friendliness.
Not a shard of irony, not a sliver of petulant, up-to-date narcissism.
Perfect. You couldn't possibly be more agreeable or less threatening.
Then, of course, he ruins it all by asking questions. They are questions that 99 per cent of Canadian journalists have not dared or deigned to ask, and that most Canadians would prefer not to hear.
In these strange times, asking direct and probing questions about 9/11 will get you instant put-downs.
Zwicker grins as he mimics the upward eye-roll and patronizing hand-flap that go along with the phrase "conspiracy theorist."
As Vision TV's media critic for the past 15 years, and as a journalist with a long list of solid credentials (he's worked at The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star, taught at Ryerson University, and was awarded a Southam Fellowship at the University of Toronto), Zwicker should be safely out of the line of fire. It's a measure of his determination to challenge conventional wisdom that he has willingly kept his head up, instead of down, and tried to look facts right in the eye.
"You know, the people who just shrug off these questions with the `conspiracy theorist' epithet should be asked what they stand for. Unquestioning acceptance of the official narrative? Sure, there are outlandish theories out there - aliens, Atlantis - but there have also been real and huge conspiracies," Zwicker told me in an interview in his home office.
I knew about some of those conspiracies. Last January, I wrote a column about American declassified documents that verify a long history of top-level conspiracies. The U.S. government, its military and its secret service have plotted to justify wars and impose their control on other countries through intricate secret schemes of drug-running, gun smuggling and assassination. They even considered rigging fake terrorist attacks that would cost American lives in order to stir the public to war-ready outrage.
Immediately, I was deluged with hundreds upon hundreds of approving e-mails from American citizens. Some of them praised the TV work of Barrie Zwicker - a Globe and Mail colleague of my youth.
I sat down, with a fair degree of skepticism, to watch Zwicker's video, The Great Deception, which challenges the U.S. government's account of what really happened on 9/11. Slowly, a frightening chill came over me. These were the very questions I had asked myself on 9/11 and for several weeks after. Failing to find easy answers, I had locked the subject away.
Why did the United States Air Force fail to scramble interceptor jets - in defiance of all long-standing rules and well-established practice - for almost two hours after it was known that an unprecedented four planes had been hijacked?
How could the world's most powerful military fail to react throughout a prolonged, horrifying attack on the financial and political capitals of the nation?
How did the FBI know the exact identities of the hijackers within 24 hours of the attacks? If their files were so readily to hand, why hadn't they been apprehended earlier? After all, several conscientious FBI agents had raised the alarm about a number of known Al Qaeda sympathizers at U.S. flight schools, and had been ignored.
Why did Donald Rumsfeld call for a war on Iraq (not Afghanistan) the morning after the Saudi hijackers had accomplished their attack?
Why did the two squadrons of fighter jets at Andrews Air Force base, 19 kilometres from Washington, not zoom into action to defend the White House, one of their primary tasks?
Why did George Bush sit for half an hour in a Florida classroom, listening to a girl talk about her pet goat, after his chief of staff told him about the second plane? For that matter, why did he pretend that he first learned of the attacks in that classroom, when he had actually been briefed as he left his hotel that morning?
Why has there been no public investigation into the billions of dollars "earned" by insider trading of United and American Airlines stock before 9/11?
I went to interview Zwicker because I was fascinated by his courage in raising these unpopular questions and wanted to know what made him persist. I saw the answer for myself. At nearly 69, Zwicker has boundless energy, intellectual as well as physical. (This is an environmentalist who gave up cars in 1966 and who bicycles thousands of kilometres across country for fun).
He has a restless scientific curiosity, coupled with humanistic principles absorbed from his United Church minister father. At age 12, as a fledgling skeptic growing up in Swan River, Manitoba, Zwicker couldn't merely accept the common schoolboy belief that Coca-Cola contained acid powerful enough to dissolve a penny. Into five bottles of Coke he dropped a penny, a nail, a piece of leather, a strip of cloth and a cube of bread. Next morning, he found all intact.
In his teens, anguished at his loss of faith, he turned to his father. "Out there in his garden, near the sweet peas, he put his arm around my shoulder and said `Barrie, follow the truth, wherever it leads you.'"
Zwicker and his wife Jean (they've been married 40 years and have a grown son and daughter) are avid gardeners and theatre fanatics with subscriptions to nearly every series in town.
His energy seems equalled only by his good humour and relentless pursuit of honest fact.
You can catch Zwicker's Eye Opener media critique on the current affairs show, 360 Vision, Thursdays at 8 p.m. on VisionTV. He has sold more than 1,000 of his Great Deception videos at near-cost. You can order one for $38 (that includes shipping) by calling 416-651-5588.
And if you call him a conspiracy theorist, call me one, too, because I agree with Zwicker when he says, "I don't know exactly what happened, but something smells very fishy." Even more rank-smelling is the refusal of most Canadian journalists to ask embarrassingly uncool questions about one of the worst catastrophes of our time.
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Michele Landsberg's column usually appears in the Star Saturday and Sunday.
Her e-mail address is mlandsb@thestar.ca
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© Copyright-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.
But what do you do when the rant can't be deleted -- because the author is a columnist for a major newspaper?
We refer here to Toronto Star writer Michele Landsberg. On Sunday, Ms. Landsberg dedicated her column to Barrie Zwicker, a television journalist who peddles an obscure video called The Great Deception. Mr. Zwicker's basic thesis is that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were likely a conspiracy involving "elements within the top U.S. military, intelligence and political leadership," that the war on terrorism is a "Big Lie" and that George W. Bush's "implausible official version" of 9/11 was really just a pretext to "promot[e] perpetual global war in the service of resource looting."
The "evidence" Mr. Zwicker presents in support of his thesis is a mish-mash of odd details and darkly phrased questions -- none of them unfamiliar to anyone who followed the rise and fall of such conspiracy theories in late 2001. Whatever currency these theories once enjoyed was blown away last year by a stream of confessions and operational disclosures from captured al-Qaeda commanders. Yet Ms. Landsberg apparently came away from The Great Deception a believer. Upon watching the video, she says, "a frightening chill came over me." She concludes: "If you call [Mr. Zwicker] a conspiracy theorist, call me one, too, because I agree with Zwicker when he says, 'I don't know exactly what happened, but something smells very fishy.' "
What is unintentionally comical about Ms. Landsberg's piece is the way she presents herself and Mr. Zwicker as a pair of heroic free thinkers who "challenge conventional wisdom" and stand up to the "rank-smelling" censors and lackeys who guard the path to truth. The duo ask "embarrassingly uncool" questions, she says, which "99% of Canadian journalists have not dared or deigned to ask."
The truth, of course, is rather less dramatic. While 99 out of every 100 Canadian journalists do indeed find Ms. Landsberg's nonsense "embarrassing," it is not for any lack of courage. Rather, they recognize that Mr. Zwicker's "Big Lie" theory is an eccentric crock. The reason they haven't reported on it is because they're good reporters.
We will not try to argue down Ms. Landsberg: Clearly, her logic circuits have been blown by a blinding hatred of the United States. And just as it is impossible to prove to a true conspiracy theorist that the Holocaust happened or that the moon landing wasn't faked, no one will ever be able to definitively "prove" 9/11 to those who see the hand of the CIA behind every evil. But surely, Ms. Landsberg's editors at the Star were in a position to exercise better judgment. Poisonous delusions such as these do not belong in a mainstream newspaper.
© Copyright 2003 National Post
I can condense that to three words: Barrie is queer.
:) I hope this post is still here when I get back.
The F-16s at Andrews are National Guard, not active duty AF. The primary mission of the active duty forces at the base is Airlift and transporting the President and his entourage, not air defense.
Just because a base has some fighters assigned doesn't mean that the mission of the base is defending nearby cities and national monuments from air attack.
Prior to 9/11 the air defense focused on Communist bombers that routinely fly down the coast of the US to Cuba and the detecting and countering cruise missiles, not shooting down passenger jets.
Well, after Clinton got into office, we no longer had a standing 24 hour a day intercept system.
But why let that stand in the way?
Rumsfeld did not call for an attack on Iraq after the WTC attack, he had made a public statement two days before the WTC attack on the necessity for US pressure on Iraq.
Bush was not fully briefed on the attack before he entered the school building. At about the time he arrived at the school the first plane had hit the first tower - at the time it was thought to have been an accident like the 1945 plane collision in the Empire State Bldg - and he was told of that first collision just before he entered the building, when it was still thought of as an accident. At 9:03 when the second plane struck, he was already reading to the children in a classroom - something very well documented - and within two minutes of that second crash he was told of it and immediately left the building with his entourage.
The FBI did not have "the exact identities" of the hijackers within 24 hours; in fact that FBI had worked up a list of 25 probably hijackers, which included most of the 15 actually involved plus at least ten who turned out not to be participants. It wasn't terribly difficult to come up with some names right away by perusing the passenger manifests and ticket purchases for those planes.
The list of this guy's misrepresentations could go on and on.
And as I have tried to tell some folks, just because it has fighters assigned, doesn't mean they're sitting around hot cocked and ready to rock (as we called it when they were sitting alert duty)
Michele Landsberg is a famous Candian feminist, and is the wife of Stephen Lewis, Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa (appointed by United Nation's Secretary-General Kofi Annan).
The Lewis' are part of Canada's leftwing aristocracy, and are considered Canada's "first family of the left". Stephen Lewis' father David Lewis was head of the NDP, Canada's socialist party for many years. Michele's son, Avi, is a well known leftwing writer and TV producer, and is married to feminist writer/polemiscist Naomi Klein (No Logo).
We didn't. They got a few names wrong, if I remember correctly. They were going by the seat numbers the hijackers had sat in.
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