John Chuckman
COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE ON CBC NEWS [FIRST PORTION REMOVED BY EDITORS]
“Ken Pereira, union whistleblower turned conspiracy theorist, joins forces with Maxime Bernier
“Charbonneau Commission’s star witness now co-hosts a YouTube show about conspiracies”
Calling him a “conspiracy theorist” over 9/11, represents an effort put him down. When you use such terms, you are not conveying facts but prejudice. Name-calling is not journalism. You certainly can and should discuss what it is that he believes, but you cannot fairly dismiss him with such a term.
Millions and millions believe that that event was not what the official investigation said that it was.
Here are a few basic questions, never answered:
And the FBI has just released some documents around an intriguing aspect of 9/11 that in the past they denied:
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By the way, the term “conspiracy theorist” was coined by the boys at CIA in the 1960s to be used to discredit the great many people who questioned the absurdly inadequate Warren Commission.
The press, always hand-and-glove with government and other large corporate interests – people often forgetting that that is where its interests really lie and not in some holy mission to find truth – has used the demeaning term countless times since, and I think it has become very tiresome.
The Warren Commission Report over the decades has indeed been shown to be literally full of holes, but the assassination is receding far into history, and it no longer grabs the public’s imagination. The many dishonesties and contradictions of its investigation now arouse no widespread concern.
The ugly truth is that when you run a big brutal empire, you have to do all kinds of unsavory things to sustain or expand it, and they are generally not things you want publicized. The United States has been engaged almost continuously in such activity during our lifetime, hence there have been a great many deceptions and lies around its dark work, just as we see with Iran or Russia or Venezuela today.
And just think back on the few cases that we do know something about. The phony Gulf of Tonkin Incident that would ignite a war that would eventually kill 3 million Vietnamese. The non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq used to start another war, one that would kill a million people. Iraqi troops seizing baby incubators in Kuwait and tossing out the babies – good God, we learned that that one was created by a paid PR firm. It was a sad re-telling of the WWI British tale about Germans busy bayoneting babies, a claim made with deadly earnest looks in 1914.
No, the attempt to use that old CIA term, “conspiracy theory,” I regard as a red flag for what is to follow.
Of course, there are loony theories in many things, but you don’t use that broad fact against someone who may have valid reasons for his speculations. I don’t know anything about this particular man or his views, but I don’t like the writer’s approach.
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Response to a comment saying, “We have moved into the digital dark ages, from the age of information into the age of disinformation”:
What information?
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident? Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction? Kuwaiti babies ripped from their respirators? Iran’s atomic weapons? Syria’s use of poison gas on its own people?
It just ain’t so. Where the stakes are great, governments tell lies. And some citizens do grow suspicious, which does not automatically make them kooks or anything else.
Scepticism, as the David Hume told us, is a healthy approach.
CHUCKMAN'S WORDS ON WORDPRESS: COMMENTS FROM THE WORLD'S PRESS 