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Jan-26-2011 15:37printcomments

Richard Falk Is Right on 9/11-Will Obama and Friends Forsake Falk for Telling the Truth

Did we miss something? What’s the problem here?

Richard Falk
Richard Falk photo courtesy: sabbah.biz

(MADISON, Wi.) - Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Occupied Palestine, is under fire for writing what is obviously true about the U.S. government and the media. Calls for his firing abound from the usual suspects. Such commitments to truth as Falk possesses can pose problems for prospective careerists, but the 80-year-old human rights activist and scholar likely doesn’t care all that much about resulting slander.

The truth will set you free.

How about the editorial boards of The Nation and The Progressive where Falk has long served? When will the statements of support come out? Falk’s story is an excellent candidate for the Progressive editor Matthew Rothschild’s exellent McCarthyism Watch. [To contact Matt Rothschild about Richard Falk.]

Falk’s lifetime commitment to the truth puts him beyond the reach of McCarthyite slanderers and cowards who see Falk and other human rights activists and truth-tellers as betraying the causethat is, America and Israel right or wrong and don’t make waves. Liars cannot erase a lifetime with one lie. It’s been tried with Helen Thomas and it failed.

So what’s the hubbub that has U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice demanding that Falk step down from his UN position, and saying, “In my view, Mr. Falk’s latest commentary is so noxious that it should finally be plain to all that he should no longer continue in his position on behalf of the U.N.”? (Reuters, Charbonneau)

Falk’s Blog January 11, 2011 Commentary [Full text posted below]

Turns out Falkhas the temerity to suggest that the mainstream media refused to accept “well-evidenced doubts about the official version of the events: an al Qaeda operation with no foreknowledge by government officials.” (Reuters, Charbonneau)

We thought this was axiomatic. But the American Jewish Committee and various crusaders for truth in the U.S. Congress want Falk fired.

The 9/11 Commission member and staff is composed of the sort of insiders Washington elites wanted on the blue-ribbon committee to prevent accountability and disclosure to the American people 0f what their government knew and when its many agencies knew it.

Remember when George W. Bush made his over-the-top appointment of Henry Kissinger to the 9/11 commission in late November, 2001. (CounterPunch,  December 17, 2002;  Leon) Even then those—like the 9/11 victims’ families—who doubted the would-be chair Kissinger’s commitment to investigate the truth of the events leading up to 9/11 were smeared as conspirators and radicals.

Kissinger’s appointment as chair was withdrawn as too obvious a choice for a cover-up. And Kissinger gave away the store on the Lou Dobbs Moneyline show (CNN, December 16, 2002) in a laugh-a-minute interview excerpted below:

I hope that everybody has his partisanship out of his system now. And that people remember that this [9/11] was an event that was totally unexpected to the American public; that it came from a direction that nobody had ever thought of. And that it was the first attack on the continental United States … . (Dobbs quickly interrupts)

As for Falk, here is his commentary crime:

The arguments swirling around the 9/11 attacks are emblematic of these issues [of secrecy in government]. What fuels suspicions of conspiracy is the reluctance to address the sort of awkward gaps and contradictions in the official explanations that David Ray Griffin (and other devoted scholars of high integrity) have been documenting in book after book ever since his authoritative The New Pearl Harbor in 2004 (updated in 2008). What may be more distressing than the apparent cover up is the eerie silence of the mainstream media, unwilling to acknowledge the well-evidenced doubts about the official version of the events: an al Qaeda operation with no foreknowledge by government officials. Is this silence a manifestation of fear or cooption, or part of an equally disturbing filter of self-censorship? Whatever it is, the result is the withering away of a participatory citizenry and the erosion of legitimate constitutional government. The forms persist, but the content is missing.

Did we miss something? What’s the problem here?

Regarding David Ray Griffin, I am going to make a point to read:

Cognitive Infiltration: an Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory 

The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2002)

9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press.

Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory (2010)

______________________________

Michael Leon is a writer living in Madison, Wisconsin. His writing has appeared nationally in The Progressive, The Advocate, In These Times and CounterPunch, and locally in the Isthmus and the Capital Times. Leon works as a staff writer, editor and veterans' advocate at Veterans Today, and as a writer/editor and PR consultant. Visit Michael's blog: http://malcontends.blogspot.com/ and maleon@charter.net




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contempted January 27, 2011 5:04 am (Pacific time)

Excellent story! So much for freedom of speech.

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