Comedian Who Questioned “Received Reality” Of 9/11 Dies

Counterculture great George Carlin passes away

Steve Watson /
Infowars.net | June 23, 2008

Grammy-winning American stand-up comedian, actor, author and anti-establishment icon George Carlin has passed away in LA aged 71.

Carlin died of heart failure after being admitted to St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon. The Comedian had a long history of heart trouble. His last performance was last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas.

Always outspoken and never a man to hide his opinions, Carlin most recently hit the headlines after speaking of his doubts about the official 9/11 story during an appearance at Borders bookstore in New York City last October, just a few blocks away from ground zero.

Asked what he thought of the 9/11 truth movement and how Bill Maher’s show was interrupted by truthers at the time, Carlin responded, "I always question the received reality."

"The consensus reality is often intentionally misleading," he added.

Asked if he would support a new investigation into 9/11, Carlin was skeptical, stating, "They don’t investigate themselves in this country - it would be a whitewash, it would be like the Kennedy thing, it would be like everything."

"The people who are in charge do what they want and they will always do what they want, power does what it wants to and I wouldn’t trust an investigation," Carlin concluded.

Watch the video.

Carlin created a storm in the seventies when his routine "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television" initiated a regulatory battle which eventually went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

After Carlin said all seven words at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance.

Carlin was described by Comedy Central as the second greatest stand-up comedian of all time behind Richard Prior and is famous for his scathing black humor directed at American culture and the political climate.

During a recent appearance on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show, Carlin said that America was "finished" because "no one questions things anymore" and that the population had been bought off by distractions, toys and gizmos.

Carlin will be sorely missed purely because he was one of a very rare breed, an entertainer who spoke a truth uninhibited by any desire for success, fame or need of corporate backing.

Watch a stand-up routine where Carlin slams the education system and talks about the true power system that controls America.

WARNING: PROFANITY.

In Their Own Words: Admissions from the people who wrote the 9/11 Commission Report that it was compromised

9/11 Blogger | June 23, 2008

Quotations from Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 911 Commission, by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton

"We were set up to fail" (14).

"The chief obstacle was the White House, which argued that the congressional inquiry was continuing, and that an independent investigation would distract the government from waging the ongoing war on terrorism" (17).

"The two sides decided to split the difference, allowing eighteen months for the inquiry—a period of time that proved insufficient" (20).

"The White House also suggested some candidates for executive director for our staff. The importance of this position cannot be overstated" (22).

"…we seriously only considered one candidate: Philip Zelikow…. Zelikow was a controversial choice. In the 1990s, as an academic, he had co-authored, with Condoleezza Rice, a book about German unification, and he later assisted Stephen Hadley in running the National Security Council transition for the incoming Bush administration in 2000-2001" (28).

…our office space and employees had to be cleared by the FBI and CIA to handle top-secret information…" (34)

"After Philip Zelikow came on board as executive director, he began recruiting and interviewing candidates…. Zelikow was selected with little consultation with the rest of the committee, but several commissioners had concerns about the kind of inquiry he would lead" (35)

"…Zelikow drove and organized the staff’s work…" (38)

"The House Republican caucus and Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office remained the most difficult obstacles. Throughout the life of the commission, and indeed through the passage of intelligence reform legislation based upon our recommendations, the strongest congressional wariness came from House Republicans" (45)

"We had to decide: How deep and how far do the roots of 9/11 run? That is a difficult question to answer…. In a way, we would define what information was relevant to 9/11 by asking for it" (58)

"We soon encountered problems, both in obtaining information and with the laborious conditions placed on our access to some information" (63)

"We decided against an aggressive use of subpoenas for several reasons…. Furthermore, we knew that many of the most important documents we sought were potentially the subject of an executive privilege claim—meaning that the president might not be legally compelled to share that material with another branch of government, even with a subpoena" (64)

"We were supposed to be independent, not necessarily confrontational. We were investigating a national catastrophe, not a White House transgression; this was 9/11, not Watergate" (65)

"When the Joint Inquiry report was released, there were twenty-eight blank pages where information had been ‘redacted’ from public view…. By being secretive, the government opened the door to cynicism and conspiracy theories…. The core of the problem is the fact that people in government can get in trouble for revealing something that is secret, but they cannot get in trouble for stamping SECRET on a document. Thus the default rule becomes: when in doubt, classify. Particularly in our early days, the 9/11 Commission faced this problem" (69)

"The White House wanted strict limitations on both of these fronts—limiting staff with access to White House documents to just two or three people, limiting the commissioners with access to certain materials to just the chair and vice-chair, and restricting the amount of notes the staff could bring back to the 9/11 Commission’s office" (72)

"…the FAA had turned over to us the distilled product of their own internal investigation into 9/11, but had failed to turn over the extensive raw materials that had gone into that investigation, even though that is precisely what our staff had asked for" (83)

"There were also discrepancies between things NORAD was telling us about their performance on the morning of September 11—things that the agency had stated publicly after 9/11—and the story told by the limited tapes and documents the commission had received…. These were puzzling and disturbing developments, and they account in part for some of the more bizarre and inaccurate conspiracy theories about 9/11."
"Farmer believed that NORAD was delivering incomplete records with the knowledge that the commission had a fixed end date that could be waited out" (86)

"Many interviews were recorded, though we were not permitted to record those conducted with current officials from the Executive Office of the President" (98)

"The FBI and CIA were fairly responsive; the Department of Defense was less so. But it was clear that the government’s interrogators were not asking the detainees the kinds of questions we wanted answered…. We also had no way of evaluating the credibility of detainee information…. In some cases, we could corroborate the truthfulness of what a detainee was reported to have said by comparing that information with other evidence. But in some cases we couldn’t; and in others, detainees offered contradicting accounts" (119)

"Where we could corroborate these detainee reports from other witnesses or evidence, we did. Where we could not, it was left to the reader to consider the credibility of the source—we had no opportunity to do so" (124)

"Senior officials from the FAA and NORAD—Jane Garvey and Craig McKinley—made statements about the timeline of 9/11 that were later proven to be inaccurate" (127)

"Staff statements also gave us a chance to work out a process for clearing material for publication by the White House. We were determined to avoid the fate of the Joint Inquiry and its redacted pages" (134)

"The evidence showed that some of the hijackers had been here unlawfully, and had not obeyed immigration laws in the United States. Two of the surviving passports had been doctored, and the other two had what our staff referred to as ’suspicious indicators.’ Three hijackers had made false statements on visa applications that could have been detected—for instance, saying they had not previously applied for a U.S. visa when they had. Five hijackers had entered the United States more than once, and three of those five had violated immigration laws that could have led to their being barred from reentry, for instance, by entering the United States on a tourist visa and then enrolling in a flight school…. In total, at least six of the nineteen hijackers had violated immigration laws while in the United States" (136)

"The hijackers were nineteen for twenty in getting into the country; they were nineteen for nineteen in getting onto the four flights with lethal knives, box cutters, and—in some cases—probably Mace or pepper spray (which were banned items)" (138)

"Speaker Dennis Hastert continued his staunch opposition to any extension for the commission" (148)

"Then, on March 30, the White House surprised us by offering to have both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney meet with the full commission…. Another condition was that there could not be a recording or transcript of the meeting…. We were permitted one staff member—Philip Zelikow, our staff director—to attend as a note taker, and commissioners also took notes" (206-207)

"The point is terrorists exist in a shadowy world; contacts are made under ambiguous circumstances, for ambiguous reasons" (250)

"Throughout the course of our inquiry, the topic that invited the most skepticism—and thus the most conspiracy theorizing—was the performance of the FAA and NORAD on the day of September 11, 2001" (256)

"Fog of war could explain why some people were confused on the day of 9/11, but it could not explain why all of the after-action reports, accident investigations, and public testimony by FAA and NORAD officials advanced an account of 9/11 that was untrue" (261)

"General Myers asserted that the chain of command was in place, though there were gaps when Secretary Rumsfeld was in the Pentagon’s parking lot, and since the president was sometimes out of reach" (265)

"At the outset of our work, Philip Zelikow and Ernest May prepared an outline along these lines, and they presented it to the two of us in July 2003…. [May] and Zelikow had collaborated on books in the past and had a strong mutual regard…. His primary role was advising Zelikow and occasionally weighing in on debates within the staff" (270)

"…Zelikow had an overarching vision for how the report should flow…. Ultimately, the responsibility for final staff edits of the respective chapters was divided up among Zelikow, Kojm, and Marcus" (273)

The following quotations are from Ernest R. May, "When government writes history," The New Republic, May 16, 2005. www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050523&s=may052305

"To some extent, the concept of the report as a narrative history influenced the recruitment of staff. Here were many other constraints. The urgent reporting deadline made it advantageous if a potential member of the staff already had high-level security clearances. (Zelikow had them as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. I had them as a member of the Intelligence Science Board.) That meant preference for people who could be detailed from national security agencies or who had been on the staff of one of the congressional intelligence oversight committees. Of the fifty-odd men and women who counted as professional rather than administrative staff, at least half had such backgrounds."

"And no language appeared anywhere in the final text unless Zelikow or I or both of us—and all the commissioners—had accepted it."

"A reader of the commission report should bear in mind that its documentary base was extraordinarily deep but also extraordinarily narrow"

"We never had full confidence in the interrogation reports as historical sources…. I think the commission could have successfully challenged the CIA on both access to detainees and release of names, but it chose not to fight these battles."

"Third, and most troubling to me, the report is probably too balanced. Its harshest criticism is directed at institutions and procedures, particularly the CIA, the FBI, and communications links within the counterterrorist community. But many of the staff had worked in these or other national security agencies. They felt loyal to them and some of them expected to return to work there. Collective drafting led to the introduction of passages that offset criticism of an agency with words of praise. Not all these words were deserved."

Martial Law: A License to Loot, a Permit to Plunder

William N. Grigg
Pro Libertate
June 24, 2008

Breaking and entering: Where does this fit under the heading "To protect and serve"? A paramilitary "strike team" commits a felonious break-in of a home in the flood-ravaged Midwest.

Digging up the planted axioms that litter our ordinary conversations can be a revealing exercise. We learn how deeply rooted our supposedly free society has become in collectivist and militarist assumptions.

For example: How often do we hear or read language that draws a distinction between "police" and "civilians"?

Our republican framework of government supposedly prohibits the use of the military in domestic law enforcement. Yet if a police officer isn’t a civilian, he of necessity must be considered some variety of soldier: He bears arms, belongs to a force organized in a military hierarchy, issues orders, and expects immediate obedience to his demands.

Police are supposedly civilian "peace officers," distinguished from the rest of the citizenry (to paraphrase Robert Peel) only by the fact that they are specially charged to protect the rights and property of the innocent as a permanent assignment, rather than an occasional necessity.

Yet when non-professional police officers are given "law enforcement" duties by local governments — as in Gilbert, Arizona, where such people are part of a unit that can issue traffic citations and investigate accidents – they are referred to as "civilian auxiliaries" of police departments. Again we see the critical distinction: The regular police are something other than civilians.

Roughly a year ago, USA Today reported that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had created a shortage of ammunition, leaving police and "civilians" at the back of the line. Annual police awards ceremonies across the country routinely honor not only law enforcement officers but "civilians" for various distinguished acts.

	Cultivating a new crop of "law enforcement" officers: Teenagers participating in a summer police training program receive instructions from SWAT operators at a firing range.

And, significantly, it is very common for "civilians" to be charged with "disobeying an officer" even when no other alleged offense is involved. That charge makes little sense unless it is assumed not only that police exercise authority akin to military personnel, but that common civilians are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Were this actually a country in which governments and their enforcement agencies derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, wouldn’t it be possible to charge a police officer with "disobeying a citizen"?

As I mentioned above, these assumptions are usually buried and carefully ignored. But they are rudely exposed whenever crisis descends on a community and the familiar pretenses are blown away. Catastrophic natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina or this year’s Midwestern floods are eagerly embraced by law enforcement agencies as a pretext for overtly exercising the kind of power that many of them covertly lust to employ all the time — the power to regiment their communities at gunpoint under a form of martial law.

Think, once again, of the roots of that expression: "Martial" has its origin in the proper name Mars, referring to the pagan deity of — what activity?

The term unmistakably refers to a military posture, or a state of war. It is the suspension of normal life via force majeure, resulting in rule by unalloyed force. And the capacity for rule of this kind is embedded in every law enforcement body in every community across the country, simply waiting for an excuse to manifest itself.

Many who reside in our flood-ravaged Midwest are learning, as residents of New Orleans did before them, that our paramilitary "protectors" will eagerly exploit disasters in ways that compound the suffering inflicted by a natural disaster. Many citizens in such circumstances prefer to stay in their homes, running their own risks in order to protect what is theirs. But it is
standard operating procedure for police — aided, at times, by National Guardsmen — to force such people out of their homes, and to use the force of arms to prevent those who have left from returning.

In the wake of the floodwaters in Iowa came all of the impedimentia of military occupation — armed guards, checkpoints, detention areas. These strictures were imposed on communities already reeling from a deadly caprice of nature. Rather than permitting people to inspect their own property, "strike teams" that included armed police broke into locked homes, including the occasional occupied dwelling.

One Cedar Rapids homeowner, understandably outraged that a "strike team" had broken into his otherwise undamaged home, confronted them and made his feelings known in forceful but measured terms. This prompted police officer Josh Bell to threaten the homeowner with arrest for "harassing" the "strike team."

The business end of government "compassion": Armed "protectors" arrest Cedar Rapids homeowner Ricky Blazek at gunpoint.

That aggravated homeowner was relatively fortunate.

Fellow Cedar Rapids resident Ricky Blazek, one of several thousand flood victims reasonably infuriated by "checkpoints" preventing them from returning to their homes, tried to circumnavigate one such roadblock in his automobile. This resulted in Blazek being forced out of his car at gunpoint and arrested.

While the armed "strike teams" had unfettered access to homes of flood victims, and the media was given limited access in order to chronicle the supposed heroism of the government functionaries, homeowners basted in a seething broth of frustrated suspicion.

After all, would any thinking person feel secure knowing that government agents, freed by a natural disaster from the constraints of the pesky Fourth Amendment, had free rein to break into their homes and help themselves to anything they found therein?

	Greensburg, Kansas.

Last year, the small town of Greensburg, Kansas was all but obliterated by a tornado of a ferocity not seen in the region since Dorothy Gale’s house was rapted away to Oz and deposited rudely on top of Hillary Clinton’s long-forgotten sister.

That’s certainly more than enough for any town to suffer. However, the police establishment, displaying government’s infallible gift for compounding tragedy, made matters immeasurably worse by barring residents from their homes and then selectively looting them for firearms (and, in some cases, jewelry and other valuables).

Gun Week reports that these thefts were made possible because officers "from various agencies" — local and state police, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, FEMA, and the ATF — "allegedly claimed that martial law had been imposed when it had not, and ordered all residents to leave the town."

Those residents who discovered the thefts and demanded the return of their firearms found them, in many cases, damaged to the point of being useless. A few opened gun cases only to discover that their firearms had been replaced with guns of inferior quality.

Bob Martin, an 83-year-old trap shooter, returned to his home the morning after the tornado to discover that several of his guns were missing. Like Ricky Blazek, Martin was originally barred access to his home by officers who claimed, falsely, that martial law had been declared by the municipal or state government. He was forced to take a circuitous route to his home; by the time he got there, his gun safe had been plundered.

After getting back several — but not all — of his guns (which had been damaged in police custody, Martin, along with his wife, moved out of Greensburg. He now regrets not shooting his way through the police barricade that kept him from defending his home and property.

"If I’d have known [that the martial law claim was a ruse, and the police were looting his gun collection], I had a gun of my own in the car, and I’d [have] loaded it and gone in," Martin says. "Ain’t nobody going to keep me off my property."

Whatever it is that prompts a man in his ninth decade to take such a commendably militant stance toward the looters in blue, I earnestly hope it’s contagious.

Provoked by the police crime wave that descended on tornado-ravaged Greenburg, the Kansas state legislature this year enacted HB 2280 (.pdf), a law that (per the official summary) "prohibits officials, during a declared state of emergency, from forcibly dispossessing an owner of any firearm not otherwise prohibited by law, or from requiring registration of firearms not required to be registered under state law."

Now, that bill was pockmarked with troubling qualifications (for instance, no peaceful and law-abiding citizen can properly be "prohibited by law" from owning any weapon he has the means to purchase and the skill to operate, "laws" holding otherwise notwithstanding). But the fundamental point here is of the "Well, duh" variety: Police shouldn’t take advantage of natural disasters to steal firearms from citizens, any more than street crooks should capitalize on the opportunity to swipe consumer electronics from undefended retail stores.

Thus it is hugely significant that HB 2280, which only prohibits police from doing something they weren’t authorized to do in the first place, was opposed by the Pratt County (Kansas) Sheriff, the Kansas Association of Chiefs of Police, and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.

From their point of view, it’s just not worth the trouble of having a natural disaster if the event can’t be exploited to regiment local civilians and confiscate their firearms.

UPDATE: Submit or die….

Justin Raimondo of AntiWar.com offers the following capsule summary of the unpunished massacre of dozens of Iraqi civilians by a U.S. Marine unit in Haditha:

"When an IED killed one of his Marines, [SSgt. Frank] Wuterich and company shot everyone in the vicinity – including five unarmed men who were getting out of a taxi. Wuterich claims that the Iraqis disobeyed orders to stop and raise their hands over their heads, but others on the scene testify that they were complying and were shot anyway. Yet, whatever happened, Wuterich’s working assumption – that the five harbored hostile intent toward him and his men – was and is undoubtedly correct. Because that’s what imperialism is all about: occupying countries where you’re hated by the locals, who are constantly trying to kill you. So naturally you get nervous and trigger-happy, and mistakes are made. That’s the sort of war we’re fighting and have to fight as long as we’re in Iraq." (Emphasis added.)

Here we see how Iraqis living under an undisguised military occupation are expected — on pain of summary execution — to obey the orders of a foreign soldier. A variant of that mindset can be seen anytime an American citizen is arrested and charged with the supposed offense of "disobeying an officer’s orders." And during periods of emergency rule, whether or not the condition is referred to as "martial law," those referred to as "civilians" in post-Katrina America can expect that they’ll be treated with just a little bit more solicitude than Iraqis — but not much.

Martial law, after all, is merely a military occupation conducted within our borders, rather than outside them.

And we should entertain no illusions about the fact that police agencies are deliberately re-tooling themselves into overtly military bodies. This can be clearly seen in — among other things — recruitment pitches like this one (courtesy of Radley Balko) from a SWAT team in Rome, Georgia.

9/11 and Ron Paul - Still supporting a new investigation

I love how they use the logic that it tarnishes Ron Paul's image by attaching 9/11 to him, when in fact he does not approve of the formal investigation, and wants a new one to find out what happened, and to hold them accountable. And that is all that was ever said about 9/11 and Ron Paul here.

This was a few days ago. The suppression of this information; as well as other information, will continue from the people, as the laws against Net Neutrality mount, the cloudy minded will continue to fall into the logic of the oppressors. Thought crimes is the objective of the Elite, for then the citizens can enforce the laws by narcing out anyone who thinks what is not allowed to be thought.

Think about it. If we are not allowed to speak the things in which we think, what will eventually become of the things we think?

They will become fewer and fewer until there is no reason at all for any mental exercise is required of us.

They are now making their move on the internet, and it looks like many sheep are going to support these new censorship laws, as is indicated here in the so called 'freedom' movement as well.

These indications have been coming in for some time, the acclimatizing of the people slowly over time, attaching good principles to dark secret plans.