..........As readers well know, John Perkins came out in 2004 with a widely read and intended-to-be shocking book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Far more important than that book's publication, however, was a piece written on it by Catherine Austin Fitts on the From the Wilderness web site. Her piece was called "Will the Real Economic Hit Men Please Stand Up? Meditations on 9/11 Truth," and, even now, it makes for much, much more important and informative reading than the Perkins book itself ever did or would.

..........So let's have a look at what she wrote.

..........Her piece begins with a definition—one that's powerfully à propos in considering the work of all the writers and media people I'm calling (after Barrie Zwicker, in his sensational new book, Towers of Deception) the "left gatekeepers." Perkins' book, Fitts says, is "a limited hangout." Her own words:

.............................. A "limited hangout" is a partial confession, a mea culpa,
....................if you will, that leaves the essence of a crime or covert reality
....................hidden. Because it includes some small part of the truth, the
....................limited hangout is irresistibly attractive to dissidents and
....................political critics whose thirst for such truth makes them jump
....................at the dangled scraps. Once the system's watchdogs are
....................busy chewing on the limited hangout, the guilty players
....................can go about their illegal business for a new round of un-
....................accountable, semi-secret mayhem.

..........While readers "jump at the dangled scraps," the real truth is purposely left out:

.............................. The phenomenon that Perkins writes about is
....................well known. But his personal "how to" account of an
....................economic hit pertains to an apparently cold case, far
....................in the financial past. While this story is very instructive
....................for those who have not yet dealt with professional
....................fraudsters or been targeted by economic warfare
....................(whether in the Third World or in the First World
....................nations) it is even more instructive for its omissions
....................—and for its timing as an apologia intended, we are
....................led to believe, somehow to assuage guilt for harm
....................done: it relates to events occurring twenty-five or
....................thirty years ago, involving players who are, for the
....................most part, dead or retired from the business of
....................economic warfare and companies that have morphed
....................into later incarnations.

..........The Perkins book, in other words, is essentially a fraud, its "dangled scraps" of sensationalism being in fact only bits of old scenery from a drama played out long ago and now lying somewhere in the dust of an empty theater. Catherine Austin Fitts is certainly one to know about such things, herself having been powerfully victimized—attacked¹—by the anonymous thugs of government-military-corporate-financial power. So let's read one of her paragraphs where she tells us a bit of what the mea culpa writer Perkins doesn't deign even to touch on. She prepares for this paragraph by remarking that "In the process of providing a colorful account of a 1970s whodunit (complete with low tech strategies devoid of the dazzling technology toolkit that is now an essential part of the economic hit man's weaponry of economic warfare), Perkins delivers to readers the 'big lie': he reveals the secret that there is no greater conspiracy."

..........That is, Perkins tells an outdated, tame, and partial tale, all the while positive that his dumb and gullible readers will swallow it as the whole and real truth. In short, he lies like a rug, his whole book (just like the 9/11 Commission Report itself) being one great big long lie of omission:

..............................Nowhere does Perkins introduce the notion
....................that cartels in a "New World Order" (the phrase
....................coined and promoted by George H. W. Bush) use
....................covert manipulation of the global financial system
....................to centralize and concentrate economic and pol-
....................itical power. Assassinations by "jackals" aside,
....................Perkins barely hints that for fifty years the US
....................military-industrial complex has been developing
....................and testing powerful black budget technology,
....................satellite and other invisible weaponry and sur-
....................veillance technology and insider-trading tools
....................behind the veil of national security secrets. In-
....................deed, it was the need for a means of financing
....................black budget operations and weaponry outside
....................the view and control of Congress and the
....................appropriations process—rather than the mere
....................pursuit of corporate profits—that provided the
....................political air cover for Perkins to do what he did
....................as his covert counterparts marketed drugs in
....................American and Third World communities alike.

..........Fitts can be seemingly gentle with Perkins when she suggests that, after all, the truth might be more than his readers—we—are as yet ready or able to accept:

..............................Understanding and facing the economic warfare
....................responsible for slowly poisoning us and our families
....................and wiping out our retirement savings is a complex
....................and very scary undertaking in comparison to Perkins'
....................concerned confessions. Perhaps we prefer to dis-
....................associate from our present circumstances, live in a
....................perpetual state of cognitive dissonance, and focus
....................on the study of yesteryear.

..........But that we may not be quite for the truth is an insignificance in comparison to the importance of that truth. That things are tough is no excuse for hiding from them:

..............................Complex and scary as it may seem, the growing
....................body of evidence makes a compelling case that officials
....................of the US government, its contractors and the military
....................abetted the 9/11 attacks. With the help and complicity
....................of the US Congress and corporate media, they are en-
....................gaged in the most profitable war and enforcement profit-
....................eering in history. This is a terrifying picture to contemplate.

..........The enemy within, that is to say, the very "leaders" who at the very least "abetted" 9/11 and at the very worst brought it about are making out like absolute gangbusters, war profiteers without historic precedent. And lucky, lucky us—us New Yorkers, that is—to have just elected a brand new state governor who is one of the most high-profile and guiltiest 9/11 gatekeepers of all time:

..............................Look how tough it has been for New Yorkers, the
....................constituency most adversely affected by the 9/11
....................tragedy. A recent Zogby poll indicates that 49.3 percent
....................of residents of New York City hold the opinion that officials
...................."knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around
....................September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed
....................to act." Yet, despite this widespread conviction and the
....................mounting evidence that sustains it, no serious support
....................has developed for the November 2004 citizens' complaint
....................requesting that Elliot Spitzer, the Attorney General of
....................New York, finally open a criminal investigation into
....................the tragedy.

..........What, then, can be the motives of gatekeepers? Well, in Spitzer's case, apparently a motive for totally ignoring the people's petition (signed, along with many, many others, by me) demanding a New York State investigation into 9/11 was high political ambition—wanting the governorship. And just what do you suppose Spitzer plans to do with the governorship of New York State to help people—when, unexposed, unpunished, and unproscribed, the perpetrators of 9/11, the drainers of the treasury, the profit-makers from war, the economic hit men, the crooked Congress and their myriad corporate and financial henchmen continue just going about their business of widening and enlarging the state of war, channeling profits into their and only their pockets, and in general pursuing "the strong dollar policy" that was begun under Clinton, that sagged a bit before 9/11 but then got a major jolt from 9/11 and that, as "it turns out. . .[is] a policy that intentionally destroys the value of the dollar"?

..........What will Gatekeeper Spitzer do for New York State then, at that time not so far in the future when, through the crimes and in the interest of the big winners and only the big winners, the value of the dollar is destroyed? Will Spitzer be sorry then that he didn't take sides with the truth?

..........It's clear to Catherine Austin Fitts what he should have done and why: "Getting to the truth of 9/11," she writes, "offers an opportunity to ask and answer the unanswered questions of who is running our world, and to illuminate how the covert cash flows really work."

..........But Gatekeeper Spitzer didn't care about how "the covert cash flows really work." By extension, that means he must also not have cared about the "Patriot" Act, or, later, the criminal spying on us all in illegal and cavalier ignoring of FISA, or, later—but before his victorious election—the legalization of torture and the tossing out of habeas corpus. What a governor! What a guy! What a strong force for truth, good, right, and freedom!

..........Ah, the gatekeepers, how you've gotta love 'em.

..........Spitzer and the New York Times—thick as thieves and faithful to the end, god bless 'em both.

..........All right, I'll shut up now and let Catherine Austin Fitts say a few more words:

..............................Although fifteen NYC legislators have also called
....................for such an inquiry [a New York State inquiry into 9/11],
....................there has as yet been no effort locally to hold the New
....................York Senate and Congressional delegations accountable
....................for failing to hold the executive branch responsible for
....................its failure to perform, or for its potential complicity. While
....................the New York firemen booing Hillary Clinton off the stage
....................at the 9/11 Concert was a start, the sentiment expressed
....................has not translated into political action or market action.
....................How many New Yorkers have cut off their subscriptions
....................to, ads in or investments in the stock of the New York
....................Times when the Times helped to facilitate the 9/11
....................cover-up by failing to ask probative questions or hold
....................officials accountable?

..........Yes, moral and responsible leadership is grand, especially when it comes from such unimpeachable and truth-seeking sources as the New York State Attorney General's office (soon enough the governor's office) and the New York Times.

..........And it's especially grand the way the gatekeepers stick with their lies no matter how obvious it becomes that those lies are aiding and abetting the big-guy executive-level honcho-murderers in bringing about ever more swiftly their master plan for an American Police State. That's where you really begin to love Spitzer and really love the Times, when you begin to really love the gatekeepers of every type and stripe, high and low, from Amy Goodman and Frank Rich all the up to Spitzer himself—for so gloriously sticking with their lies even as the nation is plunged into a worse-than-Orwellian nation whose Kaiser's motto is pick 'em up, torture 'em up, lock 'em up, murder 'em up, forget 'em up.

..........Now, a last word not from yet another thug, cheat, criminal, hypocrite, murderer, or liar, but, instead, from the dignified and intelligent, the penetrating, the morally powerful, unflinching, courageous, ever-ethical and ever-humane Catherine Austin Fitts:

..............................The answer to the question Cui Bono? ("Who
....................benefits?") from the strong dollar policy suggests that
....................allegations that members of the Bush Administration
....................fully expected, welcomed and even facilitated 9/11
....................should be taken seriously. Trillions of dollars have
....................been moved out of the US economy under the um-
....................brella of the strong dollar policy—much of it in what
....................appear to be criminal ways. The 9/11 tragedy con-
....................veniently necessitated a sudden, centralized control
....................over government and theretofore private activities in
....................the name of protecting national security interests
....................and addressing the threat of terrorism. 9/11 diverted
....................attention from and shut the door behind that money
....................movement. It ushered in a wave of legislation rushed
....................through Congress that would make it much more
....................difficult for the American people to do anything
....................about it. The events of 9/11 have acted as a "lock-
....................down" on a financial coup d'état at the core of
....................the "strong dollar policy."

....................TWO

....................YES, FROM THE NEW
....................YORKER! HALF-TRUTHS!!
.................... QUARTER TRUTHS!!! EIGHTH....................
.................... TRUTHS!!!! AND STILL GOING....................
.....................DOWN. . .

..........Nicholas Lemann's piece in The New Yorker for October 16, just like Perkins' entire book, is a perfect example of a "limited hangout." It disgraces not only Lemann but the entire once-grand tradition—institution, one may say—of The New Yorker.

..........Yet again, we're slapped in the face with a "textbook example," as the half-aware Arianna Huffington put it this month in The Progressive Populist, "of how the relentless denial of reality perverts judgment and rots the soul."

..........In this way, as the gatekeepers go on living as liars and within their lies, the judgment is perverted and the soul is rotted not only of individual media people, but the judgment is perverted and the souls are rotted of entire media organizations and, worse by far, of once-venerable but now utterly compromised and all-but-strangled print institutions—The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Nation, including even what for a long time remained the best of the hold-outs, Harper's magazine.

..........A reader of A Nation Gone Blind and a follower of this web site wrote me just the other day about the series of pieces that are accumulating as "Food for Thought Eleven." He said:

....................Frankly, I don't see why we couldn't have foreseen
....................homegrown fascism as a reality sooner, given our
....................decades-long love affair with "authoritarian" (a euph-
....................emism for "disappearance," jack-boots, torture,
....................election rigging—assuming there are elections at
....................all—state-sponsored terror against your own cit-
....................izens, rampant militarism, etc., etc., etc.) regimes
....................world-wide. If you lie down with fleas (e.g., the Shah,
....................Marcos, Pinochet, Thieu, Lon Nol, any number of
....................South Korean, Guatemalan, Honduran, Para-
....................guayan, Bolivian, Argentinean, Indonesian "strong
....................men," not to exclude Franco), logic would seem
....................to dictate that you are (a) a dog or (b) hell-bent
....................on becoming one.

..........Over the past five years, exactly the same thing has happened to America's mainstream print journalism, and that includes its literary print journalism: It has lain down with fleas and, big surprise, been transformed into a mangy cur.

·..........·..........·..........·..........·

..........Let's see the craven, teeth-bared animal at work. Here's the opening paragraph of Lemann's despicably-titled "Paranoid Style: How conspiracy theories become news."

..........But wait a minute. Like Laurence Sterne, we're in no particular hurry to get our own Tristram Shandy down the staircase, are we? Of course not. So let's talk for a minute about that title.

..........It's "despicable" exactly why, you ask? And I: Because, for one thing, of its cheap stooping to the smarmy trigger-phrase "conspiracy theories" in the first place (á la Frank Rich with his "conspiracy nuts"); and, for another thing, because of the concomitant and simultaneous lie—whether white or black you can choose—nesting in the glib assumption that nothing about 9/11 truth could possibly be or become "news" ("How conspiracy theories become news") on the grounds simply of its true and valid importance and merit.
.......... "Terence, this is stupid stuff," wrote Housman, and one cries out here in echo. It's true that Lemann, lest he seem merely to be name-calling, props up his essay on—and takes his title from— Richard Hofstadter and his 1965 book, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (containing Hofstadter's essay of the same title, which ran in Harper's magazine in 1964). A look at just how speciously Lemann's propping up is done may have to wait for our next installment.

..........For now, let's get to that opening paragraph:

.............................."On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed
....................an act of war against our country," President Bush declared
....................nine days after the 2001 attacks, during an address to a joint
....................session of Congress which may turn out to be the high-water
....................mark of his Presidency. Not only was September 11th the first
....................major attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor; it was a
....................blow struck to the heart of the country's major centers of
....................finance and government, with total surprise, by a shadowy
....................opponent not susceptible to direct counterattack. It is hard
....................to think of any event in our national life at once so devastat-
....................ing and so puzzling since the assassination of President
....................Kennedy.

..........If this paragraph had been written five years ago, back in 2002, it could well enough have been taken as possessing a shred of honesty, since at that time so very much less was known about 9/11 than is known now. Written today, however, it shows one of two things: It shows either so great a degree of ignorance on the part of its author that "in an honest world" that author would avoid "the opening of his mouth on the subject at all"; or it shows that what it's comprised of is a deliberate set of distortions and lies.

..........Whether it's the result of naiveté, of ignorance, or of an intention to lie outright, seeing a professional writer compose in this way is embarrassing. It's an irony in itself that a patent weakness in a piece of writing might be preferable to what turns out to be the truth of it. Let me explain. By way of making, first, a perfectly standard schoolroom criticism of Lemann's paragraph, take a look at the veritable riot of cliché in it—"on American soil," "high-water mark of his Presidency," "total surprise," "blow struck to the heart," "shadowy opponent," "our national life."

..........Is Lemann that bad a writer? Or is he writing this "badly" for a shrewd, conscious reason? I don't know and probably never will know, since I very, very much doubt that the likes of Lemann ever would confess. Still, what could the "shrewd, conscious reason" conceivably be?

..........Well, here we go: It could be that Lemann, carefully constructing his limited hangout, wants to sound knowledgeable, wants to sound like an expert on 9/11, so that readers—lulled half asleep by the dull, unflappable, professorial tone he achieves through cliché and the accumulating impression that he's perfectly confident and absolutely certain of the truth and of himself—so that readers won't pick up on all his many lies of omission, commission, and artful dodging.

..........And that's the art, as we so well know from Fitts, of the limited hangout.

..........Take a look at Lemann's very next sentence:

..............................Bush quickly, and evidently correctly, identified Al Qaeda
....................as the party responsible for the attacks on the United States,
....................but he chose to present the nation with a different, more
....................mysterious enemy: a broad category of terrorists, people
....................scattered all over the world who "hate our freedoms" and
....................want to "disrupt and end a way of life."

..........Can we pardon a dean of the Journalism School at Columbia University for failing to avoid that tin-eared triplet of "quickly, and evidently correctly"? Can we pardon the copy editors at The New Yorker for such an ear-jangle, they a group that once upon a time, back before the Age of Simplification, consisted of only the most impeccably talented and fastidious shapers of the language? Well, I myself forgive neither, and I myself think, furthermore, that both Lemann and the copy department at The New Yorker have given us yet another hint of the professional decay in writers and writing that—as readers of A Nation Gone Blind may agree more quickly than others—is everywhere around us.

..........Terence, this is stupid stuff. But there's stupider yet to come. Lemann is dean at Columbia Journalism. Lemann is an author. Lemann is a professional journalist. Lemann is a Harvard graduate, magna cum laude. And right now, here, with this particular piece of journalism that we're studying, Lemann is a professional journalist on assignment. And yet one of two things appears to be inevitably the case.
..........Either this professional journalist and academician, over a span of five years, so great is his ignorance of the topic, has read nothing whatsoever to prepare or equip him for his assignment;

..........either that, or else—there being again only these two possibilities—or else, as may have been the case with Frank Rich—or else Lemann is lying through his teeth.

·..........·..........·..........·..........·

.......... ..........The president "quickly, and evidently correctly" pinned the job on Al Qaeda, says Lemann. Does Lemann know that Al Qaeda is a creation of the United States, who created it as a way of helping push the Russians out of Afghanistan? And does he know that the primary instrument put to use by the CIA and by the United States in order to bring Al Qaeda ("The Base") into existence was none other than Osama bin Laden himself? Does he know that Al Qaeda, an organization nebulous at best, is strengthened and stirred primarily by the United States' continual irritating, attacking, offending, and stirring it up in ways that are the equivalent of jabbing a hornets' nest with a stick? Does he know (remember his saying that the attacks came "with total surprise") how multitudinous were the warnings given to the United States by other countries and agencies of the looming certainty of the 9/11 attacks? And does he know how systematically, deliberately, and all but criminally the United States made certain to ignore those warnings? Does he have any idea at all the extent to which the United States demonizes Al Qaeda and uses it unceasingly and relentlessly as a propaganda device to terrorize and subjugate not Al Qaeda but, more to the purpose, to terrorize and subjugate American citizens themselves?

..........Does he have any idea that the United States, intentionally let Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora when America's own generals were begging for added forces that would enable them to capture him? Does he have any idea why the United States was so firm and focused in its absolute insistence that Osama not be captured or killed?

..........Well, what do you think? Please don't pull a Frank Rich on me and say that what you think is that I'm a conspiracy nut. No, I'm not a conspiracy nut, I'm a reader. I've been reading about 9/11 since June of 2003—a date with a story attached to it that maybe I'll tell you sometime.

..........Something else: I'm not a professional journalist. I'm not a dean of the nation's foremost journalism school. I'm not even a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard. And, most important of all, I'm not on assignment to write an article for one of the nation's most prestigious magazines that tells the truth about alternative views of 9/11, those opposed, that is, to the "official" explanation of the attacks.

..........If Lemann, being all of those things, is so absolutely uninformed about his assignment as he appears to be—well, then that's an ignominious, pathetic, unprofessional, fraudulent, absurd situation and he deserves to be publicly scorned and made a model of failure, fraud, and façade.

..........On the other hand, it may still be the fact that he—and The New Yorker—know a whole hell of a lot more than they're saying or showing. In other words, it may be that Lemann—and The New Yorker—are lying through their rotten, despicable, self-serving, cowardly, fascism-bringing teeth.

..........Or put it this way. We know for an absolute certainty that Lemann has been lying down with fleas. But we still don't know whether he's a dog or, well—whether he's just a simple-minded and non-reading dummy.

..........Maybe, with luck, we'll find out in "Food for Thought Eleven,
Part Four-E."

..........I hope to see you there.

..............................—Eric Larsen
..............................—December 7, 2006
..............................—65th anniversary, Pearl Harbor..........


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¹..........See Crossing the Rubicon, pp. 55-57.