First of all, and let me be very clear, I love you guys (and girls).

Around 8:30am Pacific Time on September 11, 2001, after my girlfriend and I had watched — shocked, horrified, and barely awake — mass murder in our bedroom as the second World Trade Center tower collapsed , her prior boyfriend sent out a message on a local Santa Cruz, California-based chat and messaging system that predates the modern internet.

What he said exactly, I don’t remember. But the essence of it was this: “This is the end of America. Martial law is coming. The last barriers have fallen today.”

I recognized the truth of this immediately. The thought was my own, though he found a voice for it first. He’s at least one more standard deviation away from the human average intelligence than I am, so it was no surprise that he’d get through the shock to the most important conclusion more rapidly than I could.

He was right of course. We both were. The USA PATRIOT Act, the Global War on Terror, Military Commissions Act, FISA, fusion centers, national security letters, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Afghanistan, Iraq, FOX NEWS, stormtroopers on the streets, gleeful embrace of the new American authoritarianism, mothers forced to publicly consume their own bottled breast milk at the airport, the Imperial Presidency, $400 million for construction of large-scale detention centers inside the US, no impeachment no matter how great the lies, the rise of a modern Stasi culture in the land of the “free” and home of the “brave”, all set to the stirring anthems of American exceptionalism and slogans evoking bygone days when things like words and principles and logic actually meant something.

No matter what you think is the truth of 9/11, no matter what you’ve heard or read or thought or said, you do have to watch the video. I’ll explain why in a moment.

What do I believe, you ask? I am really not sure what to believe. I’ve watched and read and listened to probably every substantive argument made, every investigative dissection and every crackpot, jackass theory about the events of 9/11. I’ve seen all the movies, I’ve watched all the YouTube videos. I’ve read the manifestos, the scientific probes and the loony fringe theories.

What falls out of all this, so many years later, is that there does not exist a preponderance of evidence  — nay, not even so weak a standard as probable cause — to believe that the official story of the events of that day is substantially in accordance with the truth. Some ancient cultures believed such rubbish as that the Earth was flat and carried on the back of great elephants who stood on the backs of cosmic turtles who rested atop more elephants and further turtles, ad inifinitum. At least the ancients chose such solid, believable creatures as elephants and turtles. What we are asked to believe today is that the modern reality of Western civilization is a world, donut-shaped, resting atop a house of cards supported by toothpicks and propped up by tissue-paper origami.

The 9/11 Chronicles: Truth Rising is a landmark film. The actors are nothing special, the audio mixing is often sub-par, the cinematography is uninspiring and there is no plot to speak of. Even the subject matter, at times — and especially for the uninitiated — may fail to connect and evoke the emotional response necessary for cinema to be an effective medium for human expression.

Also available in higher quality via BitTorrent download and from infowars.com on DVD.

What you are watching, though, isn’t an entertainment production. It’s not even really a documentary in the traditional sense. But what occurs, powerfully and over and over again is a profound conflict, a human story of several extraordinarily passionate serfs confronting their masters with their own hypocrisy, and refusing to back down in the face of overwhelming force. Whatever you believe about 9/11, whatever you believe about “Islamofascists” and “Axes of Evil”, even the most benighted and deluded of you should recognize — in what they do, what they say, and how they act — the human spirit. The indomitable, courageous and unyielding force of a being strong and brave enough to stand up to his master and say: “WHAT THE FUCK?” and “NO MORE!” and “HOW CAN YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT, AND STILL CALL YOURSELVES HUMAN?”

And again, and again, and again and again, the response comes back, oh so clearly, from those they challenge, those who have sold their souls and their humanity — be it for mere money, for status, for power or just for the chance to be on the team they feel is winning. The response is nearly uniform in its contempt, in its disgust that these mere peons would dare to question their masters. It is entirely uniform, though, in the self-abnegation, the servility displayed by those so-called “humans” who would defend that donut-shaped earth atop that house of cards supported by those toothpicks resting on that tissue-paper origami.

For showing this clearly, the authors of the film have won my endless praise. The bravery and dedication necessary to do this is no trifling matter. These people face death threats, harassment, physical assault, ridicule and legal action everywhere they go.

The fundamental analysis of the 9/11 truth movement is simple: the global elite — whoever they are — using their governmental tools either caused the attacks to happen or let them happen in order to profit from them. Those responsible are criminals of the highest order, and must be brought to justice.

If you accept that analysis, however, you must imagine that this elite is both very powerful and completely divorced from the morality of the common people.

Yet the 9/11 truth movement has adopted a rather strange posture in response. The call goes out over and over again to “demand a new investigation”. Who is going to carry out this investigation? Who shall be charged with carrying out the mechanics of bringing the criminals to justice? Why, the state, of course! That very institution which the fundamental analysis of 9/11 truth puts forward as being the instrument of the attacks. That very institution which is the tool of the elite who wanted the attack to happen. A great many of the people in the movement believe that the state was culpable in producing the destruction and terror of 9/11, yet they persist in appealing to the state to discipline itself.

This is madness! If the fundamental analysis of 9/11 truth is correct, what you are doing is the equivalent of asking a group of war criminals, the darkest evil in their hearts, heavily armed and with the support of millions, to simply turn themselves in. Why on earth would they do that? Why would they take any action whatsoever to disadvantage themselves? And do you really think that trying to shame those responsible will have any effect whatever? If they are responsible, they set aside such petty human concerns as shame, guilt and empathy long, long ago. You might as well approach the rabid dog that just tore your child’s throat out and ask, “now, puppy, don’t you feel ashamed for what you’ve done?”

If the 9/11 truth movement’s cause is just and if it is to succeed in bringing justice, a change of strategy and tactics is required. The state will never deliver justice if it itself is culpable.

McClatchy yesterday kicked off a series of reports on the people held at the US Guantánamo Bay military prison and elsewhere, saying:

An eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad.

"Guantamo Graffiti" by burge5000 @ flickr.com

From Sunday’s article, We got the wrong guys: America’s prison for terrorists often held the wrong men,

Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo’s Camp Four who hissed “infidel” and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn’t: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

And from today’s, ‘I guess you can call it torture’: U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases:

American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, the kind that’s used to corral livestock.

The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

[...]

The brutality at Bagram peaked in December 2002, when U.S. soldiers beat two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar, to death as they hung by their wrists.

Dilawar died on Dec. 10, seven days after Habibullah died. He’d been hit in his leg so many times that the tissue was “falling apart” and had “basically been pulpified,” said then-Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the Air Force medical examiner who performed the autopsy on him.

Had Dilawar lived, Rouse said in sworn testimony, “I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation.”

From the New York Times:

Justices Rule Terror Suspects Can Appeal in Civilian Courts

WASHINGTON — Foreign terrorism suspects held at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba have constitutional rights to challenge their detention there in United States courts, the Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, on Thursday in a historic decision on the balance between personal liberties and national security.

5 to 4. 5 to 4.

How very far we have fallen.

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Well you know, one thing that my charity, Reprieve, out of London, we’ve been trying to do is track down the real ghost prisoners in this process. And if you look at Guantanamo Bay, 270, roughly, as you mentioned, prisoners in Guantanamo, but according to

"scenes from iraqi freedom" by ahmed alrawi @ flickr

the most recent official figures, the United States is currently holding 27,000 secret prisoners around the world. So that means that 99 percent of these folk are not in Guantanamo Bay. Now they’re in
other prisons elsewhere. And as you mentioned, Bagram has 680. But there’s a huge number of people being held in Iraq, and one of the intriguing aspects of this that doesn’t get much reporting is that the US is bringing people into Iraq from elsewhere to hold them there, simply because that keeps rather annoying people like you, Amy—I mean the media—and also annoying people like me, lawyers, away from the prisoners so they can’t get any sort of legal rights.

And when you look around the world, there’s a huge camp, Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, where a lot of people are being held. Diego Garcia, contrary to the past analysis of the British government, in the Indian Ocean has been used, in my belief, to hold people. And we’ve identified thirty-two prison ships, sort of prison hulks you used to read about in Victorian England, which have been converted to hold prisoners, and we’ve got pictures of them in Lisbon Harbor, for example. And these are holding prisoners around the world, as well. And there’s a bunch of proxy prisons—Morocco, Egypt and Jordan—where this stuff is going on. And this is a huge concern, because the world focus is on Guantanamo Bay, which really is a diversionary tactic in the whole war of terror or war on terror, whatever you’d like to call it. And actually, most of these people who have been severed from their legal rights are in these other secret prisons around the world.

Injury, meet insult.

From the Daily Mail:

“There are mugs inscribed with “kisses from Guantanamo” and “Honor Bound To Defend Freedom”.

[...]

The military keeps a tight hold on everything that is available in Guantanamo Bay and someone senior has given their approval for this disgusting nonsense,” he said.

[...]

“Inmates are offered three meals a day, but there are eight prisoners who have been on hunger strike for over a year asking either for a trial or to be set free.

“These men are force-fed twice a day. First they are strapped down with 16 different restrictions, including one that jerks their head back. Then a tube is fed through their nose and down into their stomach.

“The guards don’t always use lubrication and regularly use the same tube for several different prisoners without bothering to clean it.”