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FILMMAKERS
NOTEBOOK
FILMMAKERS NOTEBOOK 160 WAR INITIATION AND JUSTIFICATION:
KEVIN BARRETT
Baraboo, Wisconsin September 11, 2010
(Peacefest II, a post-BobFest event)
NOT A LOT ABOUT 9/11 AT BOBFEST KEVIN BARRETT: "The ninth anniversary of the event that did far more to impact the human nervous system and the human mind than any other event in human history with the possible exception [of] the Crucifixion. That took centuries. In 9/11, in one single day, about half of the population in the U.S. came down with clinical PTSD. Those are studies that have been quoted in numerous books, including The Paranoia Switch by psychologist Martha Stout. This was a very important event, at yet over here at Bobfest we didn't hear a whole lot about it. So I'm here to put on my raincoat and slink into a dark alley -- and expose 9/11 truth!
So I have some bad news and some good news for you. The bad news is, 9/11 was an Inside Job. The good news is that what that says about human nature is not necessarily as bad as you would think at first.
GOOD NEWS: NORMAL PEOPLE DON’T KILL (Except maybe in self defense)
And to get at that, let's think about what was discovered after World War II by [US Army historian]
S.L.A. Marshall…a high-ranking military officer commissioned to investigate instances during WWII [1939-1945] in which U.S. troops had refused to fire on the enemy - had refused to kill. Intentionally fired over people's heads, refused to fire at all, or stood back and sort of helped other people load. What he discovered was astounding -- that the percentage of U.S. infantry soldiers who actually tried to kill the enemy was somewhere in the neighborhood of ten to fifteen percent. That is, the vast majority of infantry soldiers in World War II were conscientious objectors. And that's way he put it in his study.
MORE BAD NEWS: MILITARY FAVORS PSYCHOPATHS AND MAKES GOOD PEOPLE WORSE
So, the military, being what it is, rather than saying, 'Hey, that's great. People are much better than we thought they were,' they went to work on figuring out how to make people worse. And they learned through Pavlovian conditioning -- [Ivan] Pavlov, the Russian scientist who made dogs salivate on command -- you can do that to people, too, and you can get them to kill on command, and to override all of the built in emotional barriers to killing a fellow human being that were preventing those WWII soldiers from killing other people, you could override that by basically demonizing the enemy -- making the enemy seem not human -- and then training the soldier to shoot over and over and over until it becomes automatic, like a dog salivating. So they started doing that in the early Fifties. And by Korea [Korean War 1950-1953], they were already able to get the kill ratio up to about fifty percent, a massive increase in just a few years - and they continued to perfect their Pavlovian condition, and by Vietnam [War 1963-1973], they got the shoot to kill rate up to nearly ninety percent. What that means is that in all past wars the small minority of men who have little compunction, if any, about killing their fellow human being, had done the vast majority of the killing, and the rest had just kinda gone along for the ride and not done a whole lot. Now we're in a whole new ballgame with these poor people who have the normal emotional barriers to killing fellow humans are actually killing their fellow humans, and in this case an unjust war, coming back home, not feeling too good about it, and suffering from tremendous stress -- and that's why with Korea and especially Vietnam, we had veterans coming home who were really messed up. It wasn't because they were being spat upon by peace demonstrators. That was an urban myth. The reason they were messed up is because they were the kind of [normal] people who shouldn't be killing anybody.
THE PSYCHOPATHS
Now what we know is that there is a small percentage of men…up to five percent, according to various estimates, who have no compunction about killing, no compunction about lying. These people are called psychopaths. And those kind of people do very, very well in the military because the military is about mass killing, and they do very, very well in the intelligence community because the intelligence community is about lying, and they can lie with a straight face and beat the lie detector, because they don't have any emotional response to lying like we all do. And they rise to the top of these bureaucracies, and I think this tells us a whole lot about the evils that our planet and our society have wandered into. The kind of things that have been done such as 9/11Inside Job and these criminal wars of aggression that followed are not the kind of things that people can relate to. We wouldn't do that, right? It's the Hitler-style Big Lie. It's so egregious. We all maybe tell little lies and feel really about it, but to think that these guys could do such outrageous things and just lie shamelessly about it, that's just beyond our imagination. So the Hitler Big Lie works again and again and again, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11, on and on…
I don't want to get deeply into this subject of political ponerology…. I was just talking to Josh [Harvey,
snowshoefilms], the interviewer about this -- the study of psychopathy in politics -- but let's just say those who rise to the stop who want to achieve their objectives, let's say military objectives -- let's say they run a strong country and let's say they would like to plunder a weak country. People won't go along with that, because most people have a tendency to not want to kill other people and to not want to wage in aggression.
Now most people will kill in self defense. If you invade and occupy our country, I'll kill. You know? If somebody invades and occupies us the way we've invaded and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, I would pick up a gun and kill those soldiers, just like the people in Iraq and Afghanistan are killing our soldiers of aggression today. Normal people will kill in self defense. They freak out, they're fearful, they're full of rage, and they kill. But psychopaths will sit down and cold-bloodedly plan killing. Well, the people at the top are running a powerful country, they want to plunder a weaker country, they want to get a war going. How are you going to do that? Nobody…. You say, 'Hey, let's go plunder a weaker country!' doesn't work because 95 percent of the people are not psychopaths, they don't want to do it. So you have to convince them that 'YOUR COUNTRY IS UNDER ATTACK.' So how do you convince them?… Well, one way to do it is the title of my lecture that Bob came up with which is the war initiation and justification incidents. Down through the history there have been a lot of cases. The Mexican War (1846-1848]. Headlines saying, MEXICO ATTACKS THE U.S. Never happened. In fact the U.S. went in and provoked hostilities with Mexico - but that was our justification for stealing more than half of Mexico's territory - which we still hold.
The Spanish-American War, 1898: REMEMBER THE MAINE. The Battleship Maine was blown up in Havana Harbor. By who? By what? We still don't know but one thing we do know, the Spanish didn't do it intentionally because we were much stronger, so we used this incident as a pretext to go after them and to steal their empire. World War II. Roosevelt really wanted to get us into World War II. Eighty percent of the people were against it. So there was an eight-point plan, the [Navy Lt. Col. Arthur] McCollum Memo that listed eight steps which listed eight steps to getting Japan to attack us first, and they were put into practice and indeed Pearl Harbor happened exactly as planned exactly as U.S. leaders planned it and new about it and new the Japanese were heading to Pearl Harbor, and intentionally left thousands of guys out there to die in order to whip Americans into a purple fury, like 9/11, and to march off to war.
WOLFOWITZ, STRAUSS, WOHLSETTER WRITE LUTTWAK'S PHD THESIS: SCRIPT FOR 9/11
Well, a guy named Paul Wolfowitz, a brilliant mathematician who studied at the University of Chicago who studied under neo-con guru Leo Strauss. Wolfowitz has had a life-long obsession with the 'strategic value' of Pearl Harbor…in particular with a quote from Nazi leader Albert Speer that "If Germany had been blessed with a Pearl Harbor, it would have won World War II." So, according to Stanley Hilton who went to school at the University of Chicago with [Richard] Perle and
Wolfowitz, these guys were sitting around with their mentors Leo Strauss and Albert
Wohlstetter, another genius mathematician and the top military strategist of the U.S. post-WW II,
pre-Wolfowitz, and they were sitting around trying to figure out how to do a coup d’état in the USA. And according to Hilton, that's all they talked about…And one of their fellow students wrote actually wrote a doctoral dissertation on this very issue, how could you do a coup d’état in the USA, a liberal democracy. And this guy actually published a book called Coup d’état: A Practical Handbook. His name is Edward
Luttwak. Anybody read it? It's a script for 9/11.
So these people have been thinking this way, for reasons that go back to the whole Straussian philosophy, for a very, very long time, and these are exactly the kind of people who are going to take this need to manipulate ordinary people to get them to go to war, and to put it into practice in such an over-the-top-way as was done on 9/11.
Q: Who wrote A Practical Handbook?
Barrett: Edward Luttwak… When I mentioned to the New York Daily News that his book was a script for 9/11, they went and interviewed
Luttwak, and this was when I was teaching at Madison [The University of Wisconsin], and Luttwak responded, and was quoted in the the media, 'How could anyone who says such things hold any job at any American university, other than cleaning the toilets?'
…The real issue here is that the people who want a powerful country to go to war against a less powerful country need to engineer an incident to make the people feel they're under attack -- and that is exactly what happened on September 11 in an over-the-top and outrageous way, and what really bothers me about this…. Well, many things that do, but one of them is they just haven't ever presented any evidence for their version of the story. There's not a shred of evidence that any of the 19 guys they claimed did it were even Muslim. The evidence overwhelmingly shows that these guys were the most anti-Muslim characters you could ever imagine were running around with cocaine and call girls and partying in [Jack] Abramoff's casino boats. They never went anywhere near a mosque, etc. etc. Then there's no evidence that any of these 19 guys were even on a plane, on any of these planes. There's not a single video tape of any of these 19guys getting on any of the four attack planes, as one would think there would be because there are security cameras at all these airports.
IT’S VERY CONVENIENT TO LET PEOPLE BELIEVE BIN LADEN DID IT
Audience member: Bin Laden [inaudible].
Barrett: Bin Laden explicitly denied having anything to do with 9/11 repeatedly throughout the fall of 2001, and then this ridiculous so-called 'confession video' came out in December, and he was killed and he's been dead ever since but we've had different Osama faces popping up in the news. They never had any passenger lists for these flights. They've never presented any testimony from the people who ticketed and boarded these guys. And all of this would have been in the news the next day if these guys had even been on the plane, which apparently they were not.
Question: …there were no Muslims on those planes, according to the passenger lists…
Barrett: That's true. These were not official passenger lists. Every airline has to have an official passenger list which they stamp and seal and it’s filed away. No such lists were ever produced. However, after 9/11 some informal lists were apparently provided to the media. They are different. A couple of names on one ABC did are not on the other list that CNN did, but none of these totally different lists have any Arab names on them.
Question: [about Osama Bin Laden ‘keeping his mouth shut…’ ]
Barrett: He didn't keep his mouth shut. Throughout September [2001] he did several interviews he repeatedly denied having anything to do with 9/11. He deplored it as
unIslamic. He said killing civilians like this is an unIslamic act. He said American Zionists did it. But then, in October, after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, in an extensive interview with…Al-Jazeera, Bin Laden didn't say he did it -- but basically he cheered it, because he was so angry they invaded Afghanistan. But there's no evidence that he did it. The FBI even says that he's wanted the USS Cole bombing, the Embassy bombings in Africa - but not for 9/11. And asked why he was not wanted for 9/11, the FBI official spokesman Rex Tomb, said, because 'there is no hard evidence connecting him to 9/11.'
Q: You make it sound like Bin Laden is definitely dead…
Barrett: Nothing's definite, but I would say a 98% chance. The short version would be David Ray Griffin's book, Osama: Dead or Alive? which goes over all the evidence on both sides and concludes that the evidence that he's dead is a lot stronger. Which I would concur with…
Top Bin Laden expert in the country, Duke University Professor Bruce Lawrence came on my radio show and I asked him about that 'fatty Bin Laden' confession video. He waited a long pause -- then he said, "It's bogus." Then he went on, not only did he know it was bogus but all his acquaintances in the 24-7 Homeland Security Bin Laden detail all know it's bogus. And I said, 'Well, why don't they speak up?' And he said, 'You know, in a lot of quarters it’s very convenient to let people believe that Bin Laden did it because any other possibility would be so horrific.'
Snowshoefilms video Sept. 11, 2001 filmed by Josh Harvey, transcribed by yoryevrah
footnote 1- We agree with Barrett about the importance of 9/11, but beg to differ about
whether it was 'the greatest single event to impact the human nervous system and the human mind.' Our candidate for that event was the 1628 B.C. explosion of the volcano on
Kalliste, part of the Minoan world. (Subsequently the island north of Crete was renamed Thera (fear) and then
Santorini.) The volcano and tsunami destroyed civilization around the Mediterranean, initiating the violent period of the breakdown of the bicameral mind, as Julian Jaynes theorizes in his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. In the half-millennium that followed, consciousness evolved – interiority; and deception, treachery, dissimulation -- as well as contending group strategies. Christianity with its universality was a reaction to deception as a group strategy.
footnote 2 - Bobfest: FightingBobFest, named after Wisconsin Senator “Fighting Bob” La
Follete. The organization was formed in 2002 to stop Perrier-Nestle from taking Wisconsin
springwater.