US State dept: How to Identify Misinformation

[Mark Gobell]

A useful guide for all of us just in case we are confused about what is fact and what is indeed fiction.

http://www.teamliberty.net/id300.html

9/11, Propaganda, and You

Joseph Murtagh

September 14, 2006 -- After 9/11, the U.S. State Department created a web site in which the government advises the public on how to properly interpret the news. One of the pages on this web site is called “How to Identify Misinformation.” Here’s a sample of its content:

How can a journalist or a news consumer tell if a story is true or false? There are no exact rules, but the following clues can help indicate if a story or allegation is true…Does the story claim that vast, powerful, evil forces are secretly manipulating events? If so, this fits the profile of a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are rarely true, even though they have great appeal and are often widely believed. In reality, events usually have much less exciting explanations.

And a little further down on the same page:

Is the story startlingly good, bad, amazing, horrifying, or otherwise seemingly “too good” or “too terrible” to be true? If so, it may be an “urban legend.” Urban legends, which often circulate by word of mouth, e-mail, or the Internet, are false claims that are widely believed because they put a common fear, hope, suspicion, or other powerful emotion into story form.[i]

I wonder if many Americans are aware of this webpage, and what conclusions they might draw if they were asked to think about what it means for a few moments. Certainly one would have to stoop to unimaginable levels of imbecility to view it as just a bit of neighborly advice, a brief lesson in critical thinking from the military industrial complex. That smug, infantilizing tone: it’s as if the audience was a bunch of children. Imagine the government telling college-trained journalists how to do their job! Odd too is the choice of that word, “news consumer,” with its digestive emphasis, as if it were the purpose of Americans to merely swallow the news without thinking. Really, the whole thing is kind of insulting, as if Americans were too stupid to realize there’s a great deal of nonsense on the Internet and that people sometimes say things that aren’t true. But it’s worth asking what exactly the government means by it, and to this end I don’t think it’s too farfetched to conclude that the government, for whatever reason, wishes to discourage the American public from considering ideas that are unpopular or strange. Why this should be so is another question entirely, but the point is that the government, if this website is to be trusted, doesn’t want you believing anything that sounds too terrible, too shocking, or too conspiratorial. In other words, you ought to be using your common sense.

When it comes to 9/11, the U.S. media seems to agree. In fact, on September 2, 2006, articles in both the New York Times and the Washington Post responded to the growing numbers of people challenging the official story of 9/11 by quoting the government’s “Identifying Misinformation” web site as a credible source.[ii] Ask the country’s leading journalists where they’re getting their information, and they’ll be sure to have a quick and easy answer. That the planes brought the towers down? Why, it’s common sense! That Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks? Hey, common sense! That a supremely well-organized global network of Muslim terrorists is gearing up to attack the United States? Common sense!

Of course, common sense here means little more than “what the government says,” and if history is any judge, that’s far from absolute. Here’s Adolph Hitler, at the peak of his vanity, writing in Mein Kampf that in order for a lie to be successful it must be enormous:

All this was inspired by the principle - which is quite true in itself - that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it… (my emphasis) [iii]

In other words, just because you can’t see yourself altering reality on a worldwide scale doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who are willing and able to give it a try, which is another way of saying that the difference between the minds of those journalists and the mind of a man like Hitler is a difference in kind rather than degree. It’s next to impossible for a man whose reality is limited to a few city suburbs to fathom the reality of a man for whom waging global war and drinking a cup of coffee are actions taking place side by side in the same conditional universe. Both men are capable of lying, of course, but what the first man doesn’t realize is that in the second man’s world everything is permitted, and it’s this narrow standard of judgment that in a totalitarian atmosphere will keep the first man in a kind of mental straightjacket from which only a deep mood of suspicion can free him, a mood that, especially if he is educated, will probably be contrary to his nature to begin with. Obviously, when it comes to telling lies, this gives the second man a tremendous advantage, almost as if he controls the boundaries of space itself. As long as the first man never questions what seems impossible to him in the first place, the second man always wins.

Hannah Arendt once said that there’s a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, she said, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. Under normal conditions this tendency towards pragmatism is a healthy way of making sense of the world – it follows the logic of Occam’s razor, which suggests that the surest solution to a problem is the simplest one – yet the genius of totalitarian propaganda is that it has the power to alter the fabric of reality behind people’s backs without changing their fundamental desire to embrace the obvious, in which case, common sense, far from being a stable means of judgment, will have turned into an instrument of oppression. The problem isn’t so much anything to do with the reasoning faculties themselves, but that the common pool of wisdom out of which these faculties draw their strength can get corrupted at the source, so that what people assume is a normal, everyday process of orientation is actually a kind of mental slavery. In a society suffering from massive levels of indoctrination, for instance, the real world of factuality and experience, if it were to reassert itself, would seem as outrageous to the masses as if the existence of the earth were being denied.

Propaganda is no walk in the park, and it would be naïve to assume its aim is simply to persuade, which implies an element of choice in the matter. Really, it’s a type of warfare, and it works best when the public isn’t in a position to gauge the facts. What sets propaganda apart from other forms of deception is its organizational capacity. Propaganda attacks the brain at the cellular level, becoming a kind of entrenched reality that’s very difficult to ignore, even if you disagree with the basic premises of its content. Its principle weapons are surprise on the one hand, and the emotional vulnerability of the populace on the other, and it’s method is to wage all out war on the senses, flooding the eyes and ears until its message becomes as difficult to deny as the fact that two plus two is four. Layer by layer, it brilliantly constructs an imaginary world of perfect logical consistency, a world that, however frightening it may seem on the surface, is much more in tune with people’s basic desires than the fallible, broken world of their everyday experience, with all of its boredom, confusion, and loneliness.

Totalitarian rulers rely on these methods to seize power, but as Hitler makes clear, fate is constantly working against them. It seems to be a general rule of nature that over time extreme fabrications are contradicted by the much more extreme complexity of life. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote Robert Frost. The desire of human beings to conquer nature is forever at odds with the stronger forces of time, entropy, and the rich spontaneity of organic existence, and the obstacles are never greatest than when the pride of the one doing the conquering becomes indistinguishable from stupidity. It was Shakespeare’s insight to show how close the world of a king is to the world of a fool. The bolder the artifice, the more vulnerable it is to decay; or, as Hitler puts it: “the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it,” by which he meant that a criminal whose aim is to hoodwink the entire world has a much higher probability of error than the petty thief whose ruse is limited to a handful of isolated individuals. Hitler, of course, was speaking from experience. When a lie is of the magnitude of the one told by the Nazis, it is almost certain there will be “traces” left behind, although it is by no means certain they will be immediately understood as such by the larger population. As Hannah Arendt writes:

Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations. The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda – before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world – lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world. The only signs which the real world still offers to the understanding of the unintegrated and disintegrating masses – whom every new stroke of ill luck makes more gullible – are, so to speak, it’s lacunae, the questions it does not care to discuss publicly, or the rumors it does not dare to contradict because they hit, although in an exaggerated and deformed way, some sore spot.” (Emphasis mine)[iv]

In America, we certainly have our own “sore spot” to deal with at the moment. The questions welter up like grass through a crumbling sidewalk. Why have there been reports in British newspapers that several of the 9/11 hijackers are still alive?[v] How come the FBI recently said there’s no hard evidence linking Osama bin Laden with the attacks?[vi] Why did Indian newspapers report in the summer of 2001 that the U.S. was planning an invasion of Afghanistan?[vii] Why did the U.S. government say it didn’t know where Osama bin Laden was when the day before 9/11 he was receiving medical treatment in a hospital in Pakistan?[viii] Why in September of 2000 did the neo-conservatives publish a manifesto calling for a revolutionary change in America’s military presence around the globe, and then go on to add that the “process of transformation…is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor?”[ix]

And how is it possible that never before in history did any steel skyscraper collapse from fire, and yet on 9/11 three fell in the space of ten hours?[x] How is it possible that video cameras captured streams of molten steel coursing down the side of the World Trade Center, when it’s a scientific fact that jet fuel isn’t hot enough to melt steel? How is it possible that pools of molten steel were discovered in the rubble of the towers weeks after the collapse for the same reason? And why were pools of molten steel also found in the rubble of WTC7? And why did WTC 7 collapse when no plane hit it, especially when WTC 5 and 6 were closer to the towers, sustained far worse damage, and yet didn’t fall? And what are those funny little explosions shooting up the far corner of WTC 7 in the video footage of its collapse? And why does it fall into its own footprint like that at freefall speed? And why does it resemble the controlled demolition of any controlled demolition you compare it to? And why in the weeks leading up to 9/11 were there so many unusual drills in which large sections of the towers were repeatedly evacuated?

And if the planes were what brought the towers down, why does one eyewitness that day speak of having seen, “low level flashes…a flash, flash, flash…you know, like when they blow up a building?”[xi]

And another: “It seemed like on television, when they blow up those buildings…it seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions.”

And another: “It almost sounded like bombs going off, like boom, boom, boom, like seven or eight.”

And another: “Do you ever see professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors and then you hear pop pop pop pop pop – that’s exactly what I thought it was.”

And another: “There was an explosion in the south tower, which…just blew out in flames, one floor after another after another after another and when it hit the fifth floor…it looked like a synchronized deliberate kind of thing.”

And another: “It looked like sparkling around one specific layer of the building…then the building started to come down…my initial reaction was that this was exactly the way it looks when they show you those implosions on TV.”

And another: “I heard this metallic roar, looked up…I thought to myself, My God, they’re going to bring the building down…and they, whoever they are, had set charges…I saw the explosions.”

And another: “I was convinced that there were bombs planted all over the place and someone was sitting at a control panel pushing detonator buttons.”

And another: “We had originally thought there was like an internal detonation, explosives, because it went in succession, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the tower came down.”

And another: “It sounded like gunfire…bang, bang, bang, bang… and then three big explosions.”

And another: “It sounded as if you had a hundred firecrackers and lit them all off at once.”

And another: “You could see the windows pop out…just like in a movie…I saw one floor of windows pop out like poof, poof, poof…it looked almost like an explosion.”

And another: “We kept hearing explosions that would shake the whole room.”

And another: “Within a short period of time the buildings collapsed…during this period there were numerous explosions, causing us to leave and reenter the incident area.”

And another: “There was a series of small explosions that appeared to go completely around the building.”

And another: “There was this orange and red flash coming out initially it was just one flash then this flash just kept popping all the way around the building and that building had started to explode and the popping sound and with each popping sound it was initially an orange and then a red flash came out of the building and then it would go all around the building on both sides as far as you could see these popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger going both up and down and then all around the building…”

And finally, if there’s nothing to hide, why is the government hiding everything? Where are the black boxes? Where are the videotapes of whatever hit the pentagon? Why was the structural steel from the crime scene confiscated and shipped off to China, when that is a clear violation of the national standard for fire investigation, NFPA 921?[xii] Why all the secrecy? Why all the dodged questions? Why not put all the evidence on the table and let the public decide for itself? We’re adults, right? You can trust us? We can handle the facts? So why not have an independent investigation into the matter, led by the victims’ families, rather than a bunch of heartless government officials? Why not quiet the rumors once and for all?

The questions keep coming, but instead of answers, we get the same old tired line the government has always fed us: the terrorists are at your doorstep; the terrorists are trying to kill you. It’s beginning to wear thin. Terrorism wasn’t born on 9/11. Every major European country, England, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, experienced waves of terrorism in the twentieth century, and in each case the governments dealt with the problem responsibly, without scaring the wits out of the public. No: what was born on 9/11 was Dick Cheney’s ugly mug on TV telling us we’re not safe anymore. Well, the American people need to be reminded of something they seem to have forgotten, which is that it’s possible to face your enemies without being afraid. That it took the horrible spectacle of two jetliners crashing into the world trade center to make us forget that is proof of just how tough our native sense of dignity is. If there are people who wish to harm the country, we’ll deal with it, but we’ll deal with it like grown men and women and not like a bunch of pansies. The truth is the war on terror is very easy to end: it’s over as soon as you say it is.

But that takes guts - and a willingness to embrace the extraordinary. “That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time,” J.S. Mill once said. It might very well be the motto of our own time. Judging from history, at the very least, instead of blindly assuming that the boundaries of our political reality are the correct ones, we ought to be interrogating them, ruthlessly. The scientific community needs to start debating the accusations for real; the journalists at the New York Times need to stop parroting whatever the government says. If we require further proof that these boundaries are not the correct ones, we don’t need to examine the evidence, or listen to what the firemen have to say, or watch a documentary a couple of kids from upstate New York had to put together because the grownup journalists were too busy covering the latest Paris Hilton scandal. We can listen to these men speak in their own words. In October of 2004, Ron Suskind of the New York Times sat down with a Bush aide and had a little chat:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'' [xiii]

It’s time we began taking comments like this seriously, instead of regarding them as curious asides. The man speaking here is not interested in democracy, or the rule of law, or human rights: he is interested in lying – or “creating reality,” as he euphemistically calls it. Far from being public servants, these men are a bunch of frat boys. They don’t think of politics as a duty; they think of it in terms of sport, of speed, of playfulness. When some liberal columnist from the New York Times criticizes the war in Iraq, it means nothing to them. Conservatives my foot: these men are radicals. They’re risking something insane, tremendous; one almost admires them for it, in a sick sort of nihilistic way. But in the end, we must come back to earth. Whoever this sycophant is, he clearly doesn’t understand that “the reality-based community” is the outcome of nearly three thousand years of religious, moral, philosophical, logical, scientific, artistic, cultural, political, and juridical teaching. To those of us who value this heritage, this man’s remarks are an insult to the conscience and the soul. One thing is certain: the wisdom of three millennia is not going down without a fight. It’s living still, in the words of Hannah Arendt. From one dark time to another:

What binds these men together is a firm and sincere belief in human omnipotence. Their moral cynicism, their belief that everything is permitted, rests on the solid conviction that everything is possible. It is true that these men, few in number, are not easily caught within their own specific lies...Yet they too are deceived, deceived by their impudent conceited idea that everything can be done and their contemptuous conviction that everything that exists is merely a temporary obstacle that superior organization will certainly destroy…Since, moreover, they do not actually believe in the factual existence of a world conspiracy against them, but use it only as an organizational device, they fail to understand that their own conspiracy may eventually provoke the whole world into uniting against them.[xiv]



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[i] http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jul/27-595713.html

[ii] Dwyer, Jim. “U.S. Counters 9/11 Theories of Conspiracy,” New York Times, 2 September 2006, Section B, pg. 1. For the Washington Post article see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/02/AR2006 090200527.html?sub=new

[iii] Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf. Trans. James Murphy. Fredonia Books, 2003, pg. 134

[iv] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1951, pg. 353

[v] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/23/widen2 3.xml

[vi] http://www.teamliberty.net/id267.html

[vii] http://www.indiareacts.com/archivefeatures/nat2.asp?recno=10∓ctg=po licy

[viii] http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/September2006/100906Osama.htm

[ix] Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources for a New Century. Report of the Project for the New American Century, 2000, pg. 50.

[x] The questions raised in this paragraph are based on the work of Steven Jones. For photographs and video footage see his article, “Why Indeed did the WTC Buildings Collapse?” Journal of 9/11 Studies, v. 3, September 2006

[xi] The eyewitness accounts here are all collected on a single webpage, with links to primary sources. See: http://911proof.com/11.html

[xii]http://fe.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=Online Articles&SubSe%20ction=Display&PUBLICATION_ID=25&ARTICLE_ID=131225

[xiii] http://www.ronsuskind.com/articles/000106.html

[xiv] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1951, pg. 387



Nice to know that the US Government cares about what filth enters our minds. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jul/27-595713.html