Weeks before the 20th century ended, the pundit Michael Kinsley
was uncommonly direct in a Time essay that defended the virtues of
the World Trade Organization with these closing words: "But really,
the WTO is OK. Do the math. Or take it on faith." Delivered by the
flagship magazine of the Time Warner conglomerate (soon to merge with
AOL), the message was more overt than usual: We should devoutly
accept certain pronouncements as conclusive.
Such rigid faith is dangerous. It undermines critical thinking.
And it's wide open for manipulation -- by mainstream news outlets as
well as by some who present themselves as anti-establishment.
Many decades before the invention of television, the American
historian Henry Adams was essentially correct when he wrote about the
dominant media of the day: "The press is the hired agent of a monied
system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their
interests are involved." In substance, there is much truth to that
observation in 2002.
But those who, with good reason, refuse to trust the corporate
media are scarcely better off when they lower their standards to buy
into dubious claims from alternative sources. If we're going to be
tough critics of mainline news outlets, then we should refuse to
suspend our critical faculties when we consider reports and claims
from elsewhere.
A case in point is the story -- much ballyhooed via the
Internet -- that a man behind bars in Toronto wrote a "warning note"
before the Sept. 11 events. We're told that Delmart "Mike" Vreeland
is a U.S. Navy intelligence officer who penned the note and gave it
to his Canadian jailers back in August.
But Vreeland's notations, introduced into evidence in a Toronto
court last October, amount to an ambiguous mish-mash. The phrase
"water supplies" appears in an unexplained list of landmarks and
cities including not only the World Trade Center, White House and
Pentagon but also sites in Chicago, Ottawa, Toronto and Malaysia.
"Let one happen, stop the rest," Vreeland scrawled. Below are first
names and random words like "Vladivostok" and "bilateral." The only
dates are 2007 and 2009. To call it a "warning note" about the events
of Sept. 11 is preposterous.
Two years ago, a Detroit newspaper reported that Vreeland was on
the run after leaving behind a prodigious array of scams including
identity theft, bogus credit-card use and large check fraud. The
story quoted a Troy, Mich., police sergeant: "Wherever he goes there
seems to be a trail of fraud, deceit and crime."
The other day, I called Mike Martindale, the Detroit News
reporter who wrote the April 27, 2000 story. Has there ever been any
sort of correction or retraction to the article? "Not at all," he
said.
A former Los Angeles cop named Michael Ruppert has been
proclaiming that Vreeland "was able to write a detailed warning of
the attacks before they occurred" on Sept. 11. Ruppert has attracted
a loyal following, but he's likely to lose all but the most faithful
adherents if they look at the actual "warning note" or find out a lot
more about Vreeland's background.
Yet Ruppert is an expert at combining facts with unreliable
reports and wild leaps of illogic. Last fall, he began declaring that
the CIA had "foreknowledge" of the Sept. 11 attacks. More recently,
he has boosted his rhetoric to claim that "the Bush administration
had complete foreknowledge of the attacks."
Ruppert excels at a selective vacuum-cleaner approach -- sucking
in whatever supports his conclusions while excluding context and
information that would undermine them. Meanwhile, he's apt to tout
unsubstantiated tales as revelatory. For instance, while citing an
Indian press report that India's intelligence service linked a
Pakistani government agency to the Sept. 11 hijackers, it won't do to
point out that India would have a strong motivation for pinning
terrorism on arch-rival Pakistan.
Another technique is to imply that exploitation of events after
they occur indicates direct involvement beforehand. So, the fact that
the Bush administration has done all it can to take advantage of
Sept. 11 events is presented by Ruppert as backing up his claim of
its "foreknowledge" and "complicity."
It's appropriate to demand a thorough congressional
investigation of events surrounding Sept. 11. But it's something else
to make sweeping pronouncements without credible evidence.
For people keenly aware that presidents have often lied about
foreign policy, it may be tempting to assume that just about any
claim of governmental deception has the ring of truth. But eagerness
to believe is no substitute for willingness to think critically.
Some genres of conspiracy-huckstering represent a kind of
non-politics, encouraging Americans to fixate on secret teams and a
few evildoers rather than challenge the basic institutional forces
behind social injustice and war. But the well-documented actions of
the U.S. government and powerful corporations should be enough to
rouse us into sustained attention, outrage and activism.
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Norman Solomon's latest book is "The Habits of Highly Deceptive
Media." His syndicated column focuses on media and politics.
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Background links:
"Warning note" -
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/01_28_02_vreeland.jpg
Analysis -
http://www.publiceye.org/b_conspi.html