by Arjun Walia, The Pulse:
A US congressman called a crank for questioning 9/11 over a decade ago. I examine how bullying and narrative control is replacing sensemaking.
A news story written by The Daily Beast challenged US politician Jamaal Bowman about a poem he wrote in 2011 with lines about 9/11.
Bowman is a congressional representative for New York. He wrote the poem on his personal blog during a time when he was going through a period of extensive reading and documentary watching to explore various political views. Amongst the films he watched were Zeitgeist and Loose Change.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Both films I watched back in 2007 and I feel are well thought out and reasonable in their presentation of facts and ideas. Neither makes unreasonable or assertive claims.
Bowman wrote the poem ‘Recapitulate’ because what he learned about 9/11 through those films resonated with him in some way. So much so that he likely believed/still believes something about 9/11 doesn’t make sense, and he was inspired to share this with others.
His poem contains the following lines about 9/11:
“2001/Planes used as missiles/Target: The Twin Towers,”
“Later in the day/Building 7/Also Collaspsed [sic]/Hmm…/Multiple explosions/Heard before/And during the collapse/Hmm…”
“Allegedly/Two other planes/The Pentagon/Pennsylvania/Hijacked by terrorist [sic]/Minimal damage done/Minimal debris found/Hmm…”
“We blamed Osama/Went to war in Iraq/Captured Saddam/Killed him,” “Bin Laden is Afghan/So we went to war there too.”
”Watch Loose Change/And Zeitgeist,”
Before I get into the rest of the story and my breakdown of the implications of how we’re dealing with stuff like this, take a look at the article presentation from The Daily Beast.
We see the words “disinformation” “cranks” and “conspiracy theories.” All words that are associated with one another in our current culture.
Think outside of consensus reality and you’re a conspiracy theorist. If you’re one of those, you’re a crank and spreading disinformation. That’s the black and white line of thinking of bad faith actors like The Daily Beast and many other mainstream outlets.
It appears The Daily Beast wrote this story to get a response out of Bowman’s now deleted poem which they dug it up by going through web archives. The problem is, the way they attack his poem with official facts contains multiple problems.
The Daily Beast article states, as they critique his lines about The Pentagon:
“The strike on the Pentagon led to part of its outer wall collapsing, resulting in 125 fatalities within, and the deaths of all 59 people aboard the plane.”
If Bowman is referring to the same facts I am aware of, he’s not saying nothing hit the Pentagon, but that evidence suggests it wasn’t a large passenger plane. The Pentagon is one of the most guarded and surveilled buildings in the US yet it took a recent 5 year court battle to get the release of ONE video of a “plane” striking the Pentagon.
Not only did the ‘plane’ manage to make a hole in the Pentagon a lot smaller than the plane itself, but it looks a lot like a guided missile. Occam’s Razor would suggest that given all the available evidence, a missile most likely hit The Pentagon, not a plane. Why is this not a reasonable stance to take?
The most liked comments (thousands of likes) on the video above state things like:
“It amazes me with that pilots skill; looks like a guided rocket”
“My favorite part is how you can’t see the plane!”
“As a pilot, I watched lots of videos by very experienced airline pilots and they all said that trying to fly at 550 knots at or very near sea level was exceeding the maximum stress level of the aircraft by 100+ knots. An inexperienced pilot who only flew and failed flying Cessnas would never be able to hand fly a 757 so close to the ground and that the turn he made to hit the Pentagon (550 knot descending turn) would stress the structure to the point of breaking up. Again, not a conspiracy theorist but looking for transparency.”
“There was a gas station that had a perfect camera angle of the crash site but the FBI confiscated it for some odd reason. This isn’t the only footage”
The point here: people seeing things with their own eyes and using basic logic have a right intuition that something doesn’t make sense. Instead of being met with a reasonable conversation, they are bullied toward accepting what the government states. Even while the government withholds basic information. Outlets like the Daily Beast then crucify people asking reasonable questions.
