Such a Level of Ignorance and Willful Stupidity

As distrustful as I am of polls conducted by the corporate media, I had to take note of the following. “A new Newsweek poll out this weekend exposed ‘gaps’ in America’s knowledge of history and current events,” writes Josh Catone for Raw Story. “Perhaps most alarmingly, 41% of Americans answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Do you think Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001?’ That total is actually up 5 points since September 2004.”

I wouldn’t call this lack of knowledge a “gap” but rather a chasm, the result of years of brainwashing—indeed, a process instituted from grade school onward, right up the present as millions of Americans sit idly before the tube with their brains disengaged, absorbing the incessant propaganda dispensed by Fox News and CNN.

Of course, there is no evidence Saddam had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001, and the Bush neocons never bothered to provide any, although several absurd theories, passed off as truth, appeared in the wake of the attack. Hands down, my favorite came from the installed neocon puppet government of Iraq. “Iraq’s coalition government claims that it has uncovered documentary proof that Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks against the US, was trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist,” the Telegraph reported back in December, 2003.

It is safe to assume Nidal worked for Israeli intelligence, an assertion with more validity than the claim nine eleven was the responsibility of Saddam Hussein. “Before dismissing the idea that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency could be so devious as to deliberately help an Arab terrorist group in order to further its own agenda, consider this: when investigators probed the collapse of the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International in 1991, they found not only evidence that Mossad was banking with BCCI, but also that payments had been made from the Mossad accounts to Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers rebels and the Abu Nidal Organization,” write Ben Vidgen and Ian Wishart for Investigate magazine.

In addition to catering to the elite—Lord Callaghan, Britain’s former Prime Minister, Pakistan’s President Zia, former President Jimmy Carter, current resident George W. Bush, Clark Clifford, an adviser to presidents starting with Harry Truman, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the drug dealing Manuel Noriega, all banked with BCCI—the bank “catered to all sorts of clients, ranging from the CIA and Israel’s Mossad to the Palestinian terrorist leader Abu Nidal,” Adam Shore told an Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship Colloquium.

Of course, you’ll never hear such speculation on Fox News or MSNBC. In fact, any such speculation is considered a thought crime in many parts of the world, as it is “antisemitic” and thus illegal to attribute nefarious motives and acts to Mossad or any other Israeli organization.

Moreover, as additional evidence Israel conducts black ops and attributes the result to its enemies, consider the allegation, confirmed by a British diplomat, that the “state of Israel [by way of Shin Bet] was behind the hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe in 1976, and cooperated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in staging the affair,” according to Yedioth Internet. “The operation was designed to torpedo the PLO’s standing in France and to prevent what they see as a growing rapprochement between the PLO and the Americans.”

It should be noted, according to Wikipedia, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s Wadie Haddad, aka Abu Hani, collaborated with “non-PFLP organizations such as the Abu Nidal Organization and the West German Red Army Faction” and “also employed [Haddad’s] PFLP protégé, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (’The Jackal’).”

Of course, a large percentage, if not a majority of Americans know absolutely nothing about such things. In addition, according to Raw Story, most Americans are unable to keep the official fairy tale straight, never mind incessant propaganda, as “a majority of people couldn’t identify Saudi Arabia as the country of origin of most of the 9/11 hijackers, even given the question in multiple choice format. 20% answered Iraq, while 14% believed the hijackers came from Iran.”