Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Screen

0:00One of history's better-known politicians was Cicero. Whenever an assassination occurred in Rome, whose origins were unknown, Cicero would ask the question, cui bono? Which translated means, who benefited? Want to find out who the culprit was? And murder investigations proceed this way, as I think all of us are aware, The Theory of Money and Credit I think it's very reassuring and troublesome, I suppose, to realize that, at least statistically, if you are ever murdered, there will most likely be a friend or loved one who will do you in.

1:05You wouldn't want this task left to a complete stranger. But what about other wrongs? And in approaching questions of this sort, I... I've always liked the words of Thomas Pynchon in his novel, Gravity's Rainbow, he said, if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers. And I thought about that in relation to the response to the 9-11 Commission, set up to discuss certain things or inquire into certain matters involving the attacks of that day. Here's a good example of someone who began with the wrong question. What was the intelligence failure that produced all of this?

1:52Instead of asking a more relevant question, who was responsible for 9-11? I haven't read their report, but what I've read of it in the newspapers and so forth, I suspect that that question was never inquired into. So the right question to me would have required going back to Cicero and asking the Cui Bono Who benefited from 9-11? And when I look around and try to figure out anyone who might possibly have benefited, the only one I can come up with is the American Political Establishment. Now keep in mind this does not mean, I want to emphasize this, it does not mean that they did it. It only means that they become what police in a murder investigation would call persons of interest.

2:41As inspector Morse might have put it, a suspicion is not the same thing as an accusation. And I think that's one thing that has to be kept in mind. Of course, we were told at the outset, on 9-11 itself, that Osama bin Laden was the architect of the 9-11 attack. But on that same date, one television network reported bin Laden to have said, You know, I don't know why they're blaming me, I had nothing to do with it. Which of course, his denial should not be taken at face value anymore than should the pronouncements of Mr. Bush. But we should by now have developed a healthy skepticism of the words and actions of all political figures. It's a little bit like dealing with magicians.

3:28Magicians are very adept at distracting our attention with wands and Smoke and Colorful Claws and the handkerchiefs and things like that, incantations, for the purpose of allowing them to deceive us into believing that elephants can be made to disappear before our eyes and things of that nature. So when the political establishment creates a blue-ribbon commission composed of men and women whose careers have been tied to the establishment, You can be assured that their principal purpose, like that of a skilled magician, is to engage in a kind of ledger domain that will prevent the revelation of embarrassing truths and to keep your mind distracted from the tricks that are being played upon you.

4:15Now, at this point, when you get into a discussion of this sort with most people, you're usually greeted with the charge where you're advocating a conspiracy theory. The purpose for such a charge, of course, is to intimidate the questioner into not asking improper questions. In other words, to confine your questioning to the politically correct or the safe areas of inquiry, such as intelligence failures and so forth. Like our response to a naked man at a party, or perhaps a naked emperor, Most of us don't want to experience the shame that's associated with violating the covenant that we seem to have embraced to never call a thing by its true name.

5:02A man that I've known for some time through correspondence and only met earlier this year, Chris Tame from London, some of you may be familiar with him, We got into a discussion on this over in Holland this year, and he said, I'm not interested in conspiracy theories, but I'm interested in the facts of conspiracies. And this is sort of the approach that I'm quite interested in. Those who deny conspiracies outright are telling me a couple things. Number one, that they're completely unacquainted with history, particularly Greek and Roman history, with their numerous intrigues, assassinations, cabals, plots, etc. And secondly, they're certainly ignorant and unacquainted with Shakespearean tragedies, all of which are just a wash in conspiracies of one sort or another.

5:58One of my Jewish colleague of mine got into a discussion with him one time

6:34The cost arose out of a conspiracy, an alleged conspiracy by the German government to do in Jewish people. I have another colleague who teaches antitrust law. He made the same accusation. They charged against me one time. Well, I don't believe in conspiracies. I said, well, then we ought to reduce your antitrust course from a three unit to a one unit course. Because when you eliminate all the price fixing, the conscious parallelism, the combinations in restraintive trade, all the other conspiracy elements of the Sherman Act and all the other antitrust laws, you're not left with much. So let's make it a one-unit course. What about that? Well, no.

7:19And I'll be very blunt. I support any conspiracy explanation for which there is credible evidence. I am unamused by, shall we say, flighty kinds of conspiracy theories. I remember when I was in college back in the 50s, back at the University of Nebraska, where I did my undergraduate work. At this particular time, McCarthyism was still going strong. The House Un-American Activities Committee was still in place. and there was a state legislator in Nebraska who decided to get in on the game. So he took the position that it was time to investigate the University of Nebraska faculty because there was a big communist conspiracy going on amongst faculty members at the University of Nebraska.

8:10Well, at that particular time there was not. There were a lot of socialists, collectivists, as there are at every university. But not to Communists, and somebody called him on this, and he said, you know, there's no evidence of any Communist conspiracy. And his response was, that just shows you how deeply embedded this whole thing is, because you wouldn't expect them to have it out in the open. It sounds a little bit like the reasoning coming out of the White House these days. Let you get into other conspiracies through history and more modern times. The Reichstag fire, I think most of you are familiar with that, the extent to which the German government used that as a rationale for its particular police state activities.

9:02Pearl Harbor, the efforts of Franklin Roosevelt to manipulate the Japanese into ultimately the Attacking Pearl Harbor in order to get the United States into a war that 90-some percent of the American people at that time did not want to get into. Those of you who are not familiar with that, I draw your attention to the book Day of Deceit and the author just ran right by me. Maybe somebody can tell you that. It came out a couple of years ago. You might also be aware, some of you probably are aware of the Operation Northwoods scam that James Bamford reveals in his book Body of Secrets that in the early 1960s the Joint Chiefs of Staff had put together a plan directed toward an eventual attack on Cuba.

10:02Part of this plan would be for people in the United States to be shot in the streets, planes to be hijacked and destroyed, terrorist acts to be carried out in major cities, bombings and so forth, innocent people to be framed for these bombings and the like, all for the purpose of blaming Castro in order to rationalize a war against Cuba. The Cold War itself was premised on an international communist conspiracy, and those of us who denied this and saw the Cold War as a scheme for corporate state interest were attacked by the Anti-Conspiracy League as Paranoid Conspiracy Theorists.

11:04But it's interesting, you know, right after 9-11, we had George Bush getting on television and telling us, you know, let us have no conspiracy theories about all of this. He then began expounding on his own conspiracy theory, you know, the Al-Qaeda, Axis of Evil, International Terrorist Network, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. In other words, any conspiracy theories that are outside the realm of what is politically correct and not to be examined, stick with the conspiracy theories we give you and you'll be alright. Those who believe in establishment conspiracies are patriots. Those who suspect the establishment of its own conspiracies are paranoid. They conspire, but we do not. Paranoia, in this connection, is not a fear of others, but a baseless fear of others.

11:58What would one say of a Jewish person in Nazi Germany who thought the government was out to get him? Paranoid? If so, what would you say about another Jewish person in Nazi Germany who didn't think the government was out to get him? Psychologically healthy? Does paranoia in fact not describe the state of mind of U.S. government officials today who see all of us as potential terrorists, airport searchers, persons in baggage of everybody, armed security guards, helicopters patrolling the cities, government buildings overly protected. It's very interesting, I was in a city, a government building a few weeks ago, and over in Glendale, California, you just walk in, no big searches or anything.

12:49Federal building, you go into any building that has government offices, and it's like what getting onto a military base used to be 20 or 30 years ago. And government officials and politicians with all their extraordinary security, who are the paranoids? And of course the clearest example of this sense of paranoia, I think, is President Bush's line that, if you're not with us, you're against us. Well, I think it's time for us to stop allowing ourselves to be intimidated into not asking questions In the 20th century, governments killed, through wars and genocides, some 200 million people.

13:41And I think it's now time to say enough. It's time for us to speak the truth, not just to power, but more importantly to ourselves and to one another. We must stop being afraid of our own minds and to relearn what we insisted upon as children, namely to call a thing by its true name. A friend of mine, a Swiss psychiatrist that I have corresponded with and talked with a number of times, was telling me about an Inuit elder, an Eskimo, a man who had been invited to a conference over in Europe, and when he got up to speak, he made this statement, he said, your children yell and scream, you lie to them. And I can't think of a sentence that better encapsulates the state of western culture than that. Your children yell and scream, you lie to them. I also recall the words of, and I don't remember who it was, but I recall The words, maybe somebody here can give me the source, but either John Stuart Mill or

14:51John Locke, who once said that a man has a moral obligation to not allow his children to live under tyranny. And I've always liked that. I think it's time to take moral responsibility and begin asking what Thomas Pynchon would consider the right questions. One might begin by asking, what role, if any, did the American political establishment play in creating or at least having foreknowledge of the events of 9-11. Again, these are questions, they're not accusations. It gives us an avenue, an approach to begin asking for relevant facts and to have the investigation go wherever the facts lead. It's called for a genuine Inquiry, not the 9-11 charade that was conducted. It's a little bit like having the mafia investigate itself. Bring out some good inquisitors, if you will. Seymour Hersh and John Pilger and Noam Chomsky and Robert Higgs and Lew Rockwell and Justin Raimondo and others in this room Let us no longer settle for the kinds of non-inquiries into such topics as failure of intelligence

16:29systems or need for an enlarged military police state. These questions may satisfy the anesthetized minds that watch Fox News or accept media-related press releases that they ought not to satisfy intelligent minds. My book, an early book I wrote, Calculated Chaos, was dedicated to one of my folk heroes, Dorothy's dog, Toto, and L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, a free-spirited mutt who exposed to his ostrich companions the humbuggery being perpetrated upon them by the wizard. As the wizard's deceit was being revealed to those who trembled before his smoke and mirrors show, spiced with terrorizing shouts designed to keep his conscripts in obedience to his will, he was heard to admonish his audience, pay no attention to that mayan behind the screen. Such has been the response of every political schemer desirous of keeping his or her followers from an awareness of the nature of the politically self-serving rackets being perpetrated at the expense of the alleged beneficiaries of political systems.

17:31I'm reminded of the closing scene provided by another fabulist, George Orwell, an animal farm. The pigs had schemed to tyrannize their barnyard brethren with the same kind of lies and factual distortions that have long emanated from the district of collectivism. War is peace, freedom is slavery, love is hate, all animals are equal but some are more equal than others. At the end, the pigs conspired in the living room of the hated farmhouse with the human business interests from town who had participated in the systematic exploitation and killing of the denizens of Animal Farm. As the pigs conducted their business with the local humans, the other animals looked in the window of the farmhouse to discover the conspiracy that had been playing out at their expense.

18:19The story ended there, leaving us to contemplate what, if anything, the barnyard bourgeoisie and the pastureland proletariat might have learned and what responses they might have made to this awareness. At a time when our lives, liberties, and wealth are being consumed by a Leviathan that is metastasizing itself throughout the body of all humanity, it is incumbent upon us, the living, the protectors of our children and grandchildren, to insist upon looking where we are told we ought not to look, and to resist those who warn us to pay no attention to that man behind the screen. Thank you. Thank you very much.