PRA vs. Socratic Questioning

What a depoliticising audio collage this is, which strains itself to contort selected voices into a single choir of unquestioning acceptance of the official government conspiracy theory. It’s OK to lament the death and destruction, even the political aftermath, so long as one doesn’t question the official 9/11 conspiracy theory.

This is not a collage of competing points of view. All of the sound-bites seem to have been carefully selected to generate the only tone and mood one walks away with, one of tremulous vulnerability and tragedy, of an audience traumatised and questioning nothing, but their own safety, of an audience delivering itself softly to the loving arms and soothing embrace of the Pacifica Radio Archives, which, at the hands of Brian De Shazor and Mark Torres, will only serve to further re-traumatise listeners by replaying the events of 9/11 with no new insights or questions regarding what really happened that day.

I suppose we are to applaud the PRA now for daring to mention the sad plight of the toxified masses poisoned by the New York City destruction, something KPFA and Pacifica should have been doing all along anyway. Yet, there’s a whole range of emotions and reactions to 9/11, but De Shazor and Torres down-play the voices of dissent and empirical analysis and instead focus on the voices of sorrow, fear, and spirituality. At this rate, maybe in another decade, the PRA will include the Socratic voices of skepticism questioning the official government conspiracy theory, instead of pushing an agenda of dismissiveness toward anyone daring to question the status quo (but not if De Shazor and Torres are still in control of the PRA). Who gave these two individuals the keys to the PRA?

At one point, we hear Cornel West, from 2003, call for “Socratic questioning.” This seems to be acceptable to De Shazor and Torres because West doesn’t directly apply “Socratic questioning” to the official government conspiracy theory about 9/11. West only beats around the bush and then very quickly begins to psychoanalyse, and in that sense, pathologise the U.S. populace and by that oratorical device dismiss the most elucidating questions about what really happened on 9/11 and who really controls the U.S.

Then we hear Tariq Ali question whether this was an act of war or terrorism. Clearly, we must understand this was an act of terrorism, as does Tariq Ali, an act of terrorism “carried out by, essentially, a small group of individuals, on the orders of a slightly larger organisation, maximum, two or three thousand people.” 9/11 is a police matter, requiring a police investigation, not the knee-jerk reactions of an imperialistic and hegemonic global superpower with military bases across the planet.

Chomsky never questions this point because then he’d have to question all of the other terrible actions of the U.S. government post-9/11. As Tariq Ali reminded us from Georgetown University in 2002, “Now, if [9/11] was an act of terror, then it becomes an extremely important question as to how a state responds to such an act of terror. In the past, states have not gone to war because of an act of terror.” In Chomsky’s version of reality, 18 men with box cutters waged war on the U.S.

Again, Chomsky has been virtually silent on 9/11, focusing instead on the minutiae of U.S. military operations here and there, but never questioning the fundamentally fraudulent pretext of the so-called ‘war on terror,’ upon which virtually all U.S. imperialism and domestic fascism is now predicated. The only occasions Chomsky has opted to speak out on 9/11 is in apparent attempts to silence dissent and Socratic questioning and smear such dissenters and questioners through ad hominem attacks, such as calling them “conspiracy theorists,” a label thoroughly dirtied by the corporate media Yet, those who believe the official 9/11 conspiracy theory are, themselves, ‘conspiracy theorists.’

It’s also a shame to hear Chomsky (as Doug Henwood has also attempted to do recently) deride dissenters as being plagued by their ‘belief,’ to which he ascribes “fanatic” and “religious” qualities. Yet, questioning is not the same as believing. But Chomsky’s zeal to bash questioners without refuting them is virtually shattering Chomsky’s credibility as a champion of the people.

(Incidentally, another topic Chomsky is soft on is the role of the Democratic Party in undermining progressive struggles for positive socioeconomic change and the political theatre of the faux-competition between the twin-corporate political parties. As smart as Chomsky is, and ostensibly concerned with social justice, one would think he’d have long ago concluded, as Ralph Nader has, the Democratic Party is a major hindrance to progressives and social justice activists because of the false hope placed in it and the perpetual pandering to the Republican Party it insists upon at every key issue. One would think Chomsky would promote electoral reform, political diversity, opening up electoral debates to independent and third-parties, and ending the two-party dictatorship instead of acquiescing to it, and so on. Oh, but, no.)

Noam Chomsky says about dissent regarding 9/11,”It doesn’t make sense…” simply because ‘there would have been a leak.’ What doesn’t make sense is how little attention Chomsky affords one of the most significant and transformative events in U.S. history. And yet, there have been corrupt conspiracies by the U.S. government in the past that we know about today, such as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, wherein U.S. government deception manufactured a pretext for invading Vietnam. Chomsky is someone who has written tomes and volumes apparently critical of U.S. hegemony, militarism, and imperialism. Yet, where the 9/11 attacks are concerned, Chomsky is oddly dismissive and unquestioning. If Chomsky is so convinced with the official government conspiracy theory and so blithely dismisses the millions who question it and raise other questions, why doesn’t Chomsky help those masses understand his preferred conspiracy theory? Chomsky is not only dismissive of people questioning the official 9/11 conspiracy theory; he seems outright hostile to them. His cool intellectual dispassion seems to give way to vehemence in this regard.

Why doesn’t Chomsky simply refute these claims?

Why doesn’t Chomsky simply refute fact-claims, such as
• No sky-scraper has ever fallen due to fire.
• Why did WTC Building 7 fall for no reason, at apparently free-fall speed?
• Why did WTC Leaseholder, Larry Silverstein, decide to “just pull” WTC Building 7?
• Was it really possible to wire WTC Building 7 for a controlled demolition in a matter of hours, or had it been wired beforehand? If so, by whom, and why? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WYdAJQV100 )
• Why has WTC Building 7 been virtually ignored by the mass media?
• Why was there a Secret Service operations base at WTC Building 7 on 9/11?
• Why do the WTC Twin Towers appear to fall at free-fall speed within one-hour of the airplane impacts, when the Twin Towers were designed to withstand the impacts of airplanes and other skyscrapers have burned for hours and hours and never fallen?
• Why have architects and engineers described the WTC structural failures as “controlled demolitions”?
• Why was there no plane wreckage recovered from neither the Pentagon 9/11 crime scene, nor the Pennsylvania 9/11 crime scene?
• Why did Bush secretly fly the Royal Saudi family out of the U.S. in the wake of 9/11?
• Why was NORAD conducting security drills identical to the actual plane hijackings the world witnessed?
• Why wasn’t Bush immediately evacuated on 9/11 by the U.S. Secret Service, as his location was publicly known and he was then vulnerable on a day when terrorist attacks were underway?
• How are Oswald, Hinckley, Atta, and Breivick not patsies in military drills gone live? (See “Oswald, Hinckley, Atta, Breivik — all Patsies in Drills Gone Live,” http://tarpley.net/ or http://tarpley.net/2011/09/06/oswald-hinckley-atta-breivik-all-patsies-i... )
• Why did families of 9/11 victims have to sue in court to demand a 9/11 investigation?
• Why was the 9/11 Commission plagued by conflicts of interest, including Bush appointees?

I’m simply another KPFA listener. But even a layperson knows these are questions any crime scene investigation would address. I’m not a 9/11 activist. Yet, it’s difficult not to find the lack of critical thinking from scholars, such as Chomsky, regarding this issue insulting and cowardly.

We know there are many people that have dedicated much more time to these questions and have had the opportunity to discuss with others this information, repressed and dismissed by the corporate media and even the alternative media and its celebrity intellectuals, such as Chomsky. The fact that Chomsky refers to 9/11 skeptics as 9/11 conspiracy theorists is telling.

For example, www.911truth.org lists their top reasons to doubt the official 9/11 conspiracy theory. If Chomsky (and other KPFA/Pacifica voices, such as Doug Henwood, Sasha Lilley, and Brian Edwards-Tiekert) are so convinced all of these issues are bogus, why not simply refute them point by point? Such debate is the reason so many listen to and support KPFA and Pacifica radio.

Chomsky says because there are other issues for activists to concern themselves with, people should simply forget about questioning what really happened on 9/11/01. Well, that is simply unacceptable.

We know very well the fascistic consequences that have been pushed by the most corrupt elements permeating the U.S. government, as Dennis Kucinich, Naomi Wolf, among others, lay out. To stop questioning is an extremely flimsy argument, nay edict, from a man the world has come to view as a towering intellectual. People will stop questioning when their questions are refuted. Yet, Chomsky fails to do that, as he fails to respect the right of others to question without being smeared by figures of authority, such as him.

Chomsky, himself, has discussed how dissidents are endangered when they really begin to challenge the status quo. Perhaps, Chomsky is simply afraid of such a fate.

During one KPFA broadcast, Chomsky discussed the way dissidents on the left are treated, depending on the country, but seems to go soft on state terrorism within the United States:

Chomsky says: “And, in fact, the way dissident intellectuals are treated, of course, does vary. So, um, in the United States, let’s say, maybe they’re vilified or something. And in the Old Soviet Union, say, in Czechoslovakia, in the 1960s and ‘70s, they could be imprisoned, like, uh, Havel, was imprisoned. If you were in American domains, at that time, like El Salvador, you’d get your brains blown out by an elite battalion trained in a U.S. special warfare school. So, yes, people are treated differently, depending on the country.” (http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/73083 , circa 18:12)

So, Chomsky, like many of us, is aware of how dissident intellectuals are treated, which interestingly, by the way, sounds a lot like conspiratorial conditions. What forces, groups, organisations are so conspiring throughout the world to repress dissident intellectuals? Does Chomsky dare ask? (Who sponsors such violence? Which corporations? Which banks? Which political parties? What are we to make of the Trilateral Commission or Bohemian Grove or the Bilderberg Group?)

Chomsky seems to down-play how intellectual dissidents are treated in the U.S., where he says they will be merely “vilified or something.” By this logic, then, we are to presume Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X didn’t qualify as intellectual dissidents, or the Black Panthers, or other dissidents throughout U.S. history. Chomsky seems to ignore COINTEL-PRO and other FBI and CIA programmes designed to crush dissidence in the U.S.

It’s a shame to hear such a broadcast from the Pacifica Radio Archives, which could have included many more controversial voices, such as Webster Tarpley or David Ray Griffin. But instead Brian De Shazor and Mark Torres, essentially, distort history to promote their agenda opposed to controversial questioning and determined to depoliticise its audience.