Why I Still Don’t Talk About 9/11 While Talk of Trump Using Nukes Increases

With the twenty-fifth anniversary of “9/11” this week, it is important to remember all the warning signs that were evident in the months leading up to the events of that terrible day and the anthrax attacks that followed. Despite their obviousness, the Bush administration, after the fact, denied that they were aware of them. They claimed they were taken by surprise by Al Qaeda terrorists led by Osama bin Laden.

They were lying.

The bitter truth – hard to swallow – is that not only were they aware of the signs but had laid them out like breadcrumbs to create a false trail to those upon whom they would pin the crimes, while claiming it was a surprise attack – “another Pearl Harbor,” as they and their media stenographers shouted from the rooftops in concordance with Pearl Harbor, the action film of that summer.

The phrase “a new Pearl Harbor” was the centerpiece of a neoconservative plan to murder thousands in the United States to create a justification to murder millions more around the world. And there it was in black and white in a 1997 document for all the world to see: that the U.S. could not carry out its imperialist ambitions “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”

If another false flag attacks occurs in the future – blamed on barbarians – will it be called “a new 9/11” and be used to justify Trump’s use of nuclear weapons against Iran? Russia?

Will we claim to be taken by complete surprise if we survive?

It’s almost a year since Dick Cheney died. He hadn’t changed his ways since 2001, except to embrace Democratic war making instead of Republican. Actually, that’s wrong, for as Mr. Neocon, a signer of the bloodthirsty neo-conservative document The Project for the New American Century, he always welcomed and got bipartisan support to attack Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. The neo-cons, who are aligned with Israel that owns Trump and the U.S. Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, and whose document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” contains that phrase “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor,” still hold great power in Washington. It’s authors have never been shy about concealing their bellicose and nihilistic intentions. That they vocally support the genocide of the Palestinians should not be surprising.

There was no need for these neocons to mention the Palestinians years ago when creating a false flag narrative. Their slaughter was guaranteed and had been ongoing for decades, not only because so many neocons held dual Israeli-U.S. citizenship, but because of all the Israel Lobby money flowing into the pockets of Congress. As for the Russians, attacking them was pure Americana, for they were always coming to get us, just as those sneaky Chinese who had their eyes on seizing California.

Have you ever noticed how in all the political commentary and debates since 2001, the truth about what happened on September 11, 2001 is never seriously discussed? It is just assumed that the government’s version of events is true, with minor limited hangouts, such as the Saudi’s financing of some of the alleged hijackers.

It is a third rail of American politics; question it and your goose is cooked.

By September 2001, George Bush, Jr. was in major political trouble in his first year in office. “9/11” saved his skin and made him into a national hero with a bullhorn in the wreckage of the Twin Towers. It allowed him to pursue his endless war on terror and win a second term even while destroying Iraq. Obama, picking up Bush’s baton while offering the usual phony critiques of his policies, quickly bailed out Wall Street and the banks and proceeded to attack seven Muslim countries.

In 2026, Donald Trump is in major political trouble as the mid-term elections approach in his second term. He is caught in a quagmire with his losing war with Iran. His patron and blackmailer Israel has him up against the wall. Russia and China, ruled by far smarter leaders, are confounding him. His popularity has plummeted. All indications are that he is a man at the end of his tether, crazed, fascistic, and desperate. People like him do insane things. Nuclear weapons are at his disposal.

As the daily news of the day makes clear, mentally unstable desperate people do evil things. They take knives, guns, clubs and walk out on an ordinary day and slaughter innocent people, on a street, in a school, on a subway, everywhere and anywhere. Nuclear weapons can kill a few more, and we are ruled by madmen.

I wrote the following article years ago. It is history. I offer it again as a reminder of how devious and sophisticated is the propaganda used to deceive the public. Words matter, as Orwell made clear in Nineteen Eighty-Four and “Politics and the English Language.”

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, was a non-teaching day for me. I was home when the phone rang at 9 A.M.  It was my daughter, who was on a week’s vacation with her future husband.  “Turn on the TV,” she said. “Why?” I asked. “Haven’t you heard?  A plane hit the World Trade Tower.”

I turned the TV on and watched a plane crash into the Tower. I said, “They just showed a replay.” She quickly corrected me, “No, that’s another plane.” And we talked as we watched in horror, learning that it was the South Tower this time. Sitting next to my daughter was my future son-in-law; he had not had a day off from work in a year. He had finally taken a week’s vacation so they could go to Cape Cod.  He worked on the 100^th floor of the South Tower. By chance, he had escaped the death that claimed 176 of his co-workers.

That was my introduction to the attacks. Many years have disappeared behind us, yet it seems like yesterday. And yet again, it seems like long, long ago.

Over the next few days, as the government and the media accused Osama bin Laden and 19 Arabs of being responsible for the attacks, I told a friend that what I was hearing wasn’t believable; the official story was full of holes.

I am a born and bred New Yorker with a long family history rooted in the NYC Fire and Police Departments, one grandfather having been the Deputy Chief of the Fire Department, the highest ranking uniformed firefighter, and the other a NYPD cop; a niece and her husband were NYPD detectives deeply involved in the response to that day’s attacks; two cousins were cops. Hearing the absurd official explanations and the deaths of so many innocent people, including many hundreds of heroic firefighters, cops, and emergency workers, I felt a suspicious rage. It was a reaction that I couldn’t fully explain, but it set me on a search for the truth. I proceeded in fits and starts, but by the fall of 2004, with the help of the extraordinary work of David Ray Griffin, Michael Ruppert, and other early skeptics, I could articulate the reasons for my initial intuition. I set about creating and teaching a college course on what had come to be called “9/11.”

But I no longer refer to the events of that day by those numbers. Let me explain why.

By 2004 I had enough solid evidence to convince me that the U.S. government’s claims (and The 9/11 Commission Report) were fictitious.  They seemed so blatantly false that I concluded the attacks were a deep-state intelligence operation whose purpose was to initiate a national state of emergency to justify wars of aggression, known euphemistically as “the war on terror.”  The sophistication of the attacks, and the lack of any proffered evidence for the government’s claims, suggested that a great deal of planning had been involved.

Yet I was chagrined and amazed by so many people’s insouciant lack of interest in questioning and researching the most important world event since the assassination of President Kennedy.  I understood the various psychological dimensions of this denial, the fear, the cognitive dissonance, etc., but I sensed something else as well.  For so many people their minds were like beds already “made up.” I found that many young people were the exceptions, while most of their elders dared not question the official narrative. These included many prominent leftist critics of American foreign policy, such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Alexander Cockburn, and others, whose defenses of the official government and media explanations (when they even made such defenses; often they just trashed skeptics as “9/11 conspiracy nuts,” to quote Cockburn) totally lacked any scientific or logical rigor or even knowledge of the facts. Now that years have elapsed, this seems truer than ever.  There is a long list of leftists who refuse to examine matter to this very day.  And most interestingly, they also do the same with the assassination of JFK, the other key seminal event of recent American history.

I kept thinking of the ongoing language and logic used to describe what had happened that terrible day in 2001 and in the weeks to follow with the nonsense proffered about the anthrax attacks that originated from a U.S. bioweapons lab.  It all seemed so clichéd and surreal, as if set phrases had it been extracted from some secret manual, phrases that rung with an historical resonance that cast a spell on the public, as if mass hypnosis were involved. People seemed mesmerized as they spoke of the events in the official language that had been presented to them.

So with the promptings of people like Graeme MacQueen, Lance de Haven-Smith, T.H. Meyer, et al., and much study and research, I have concluded that my initial intuitive skepticism was correct and that a process of linguistic mind-control was in place before, during, and after the attacks.  As with all good propaganda, the language had to be insinuated over time and introduced through intermediaries.  It had to seem “natural” and to flow out of events, not to precede them.  And it had to be repeated over and over again.

In summary form, I will list the language I believe “made up the minds” of those who have refused to examine the government’s claims about the September 11 attacks and the subsequent anthrax attacks.

1. Pearl Harbor. As pointed out by David Ray Griffin and others, this term was used in September 2000 in The Project for the New American Century’s (PNAC) report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (p.51).  Its neo-con authors argued that the U.S. wouldn’t be able to attack Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. “absent some catastrophic event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”  Then on January 11, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s “Space Commission” warned that the U.S. could face a “space Pearl Harbor” if it weren’t careful and didn’t increase space security.  Rumsfeld urged support for the proposed U.S. national missile defense system opposed by Russia and China and massive funding for the increased weaponization of space.  At the same time he went around handing out and recommending Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962) by Roberta Wohlstetter, who had spent almost two decades working for The Rand Corporation and who claimed that Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack that shocked U.S. leaders. Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor – those words and images dominated public consciousness for many months before 11 September 2001, and of course after. The film Pearl Harbor, made with Pentagon assistance and a massive budget, was released on May 25, 2001 and was a box office hit. It was in the theatres throughout the summer. The thought of the attack on Pearl Harbor (not a surprise to the U.S. government, but presented as such) was in the news all summer despite the fact that the 60th anniversary of that attack was not until December 7, 2001, a more likely release date. So why was it released so early?  Once the September 11 attacks occurred, the Pearl Harbor analogy was “plucked out” of the social atmosphere and used constantly, beginning immediately. Another “Day of Infamy,” another surprise attack blared the media and government officials.  A New Pearl Harbor!  George W.  Bush was widely reported to have had the time that night, after a busy day of flying hither and yon to avoid the terrorists who for some reason had forgotten he was in a classroom in Florida, to allegedly use it in his diary, writing that “the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century took place today. We think it is Osama bin Laden.” Shortly after the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor on December 7, Bush then formerly announced, referencing the attacks of September 11, that the U. S. would withdraw from the ABM Treaty. The examples of this Pearl Harbor/ September 11 analogy are manifold, but I am summarizing, so I will skip giving them.  Any casual researcher can confirm this.
2. Homeland. This strange un-American term, another WW II word associated with another enemy – Nazi Germany – was also used many times by the neo-con authors of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” I doubt any average American referred to this country by that term before. Of course it became the moniker for The Department of Homeland Security, marrying home with security to form a comforting name that simultaneously and unconsciously suggests a defense against Hitler-like evil coming from the outside. Not coincidentally, Hitler introduced it into the Nazi propaganda vernacular at the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Both usages conjured up images of a home besieged by alien forces intent on its destruction; thus preemptive action was in order. Now the Department of Homeland Security with its massive budget is lodged permanently in popular consciousness and in fact.
3. Ground Zero. This is a third WWII (“the Good War”) term first used at 11:55 A.M. on September 11 by Mark Walsh (aka “the Harley Guy” because he was wearing a Harley-Davidson tee shirt) in an interview on the street by a Fox News reporter, Rick Leventhal. Identified as a Fox free-lancer, Walsh also explained the Twin Towers’ collapse in a precise, well-rehearsed manner that would be the same illogical and anti-scientific explanation later given by the government: “mostly due to structural failure because the fire was too intense.” Ground zero – a nuclear bomb term first used by U.S. scientists to refer to the spot where they exploded the first nuclear bomb in New Mexico in 1945 – became another meme adopted by the media that suggested a nuclear attack had occurred or might in the future if the U.S. didn’t act. The nuclear scare was raised again and again by George W. Bush and U.S. officials in the days and months following the attacks, although nuclear weapons were beside the point in terms of the 11 September attacks, but surely not as a scare tactic and as part of the plan to withdraw from the ABM treaty that would be announced in December. But the conjoining of “nuclear” with “ground zero” served to raise the fear factor dramatically. Ironically, the project to develop the nuclear bomb was called the Manhattan Project and was headquartered at 270 Broadway, NYC, a few short blocks north of the World Trade Center.
4. The Unthinkable. This is another nuclear term whose usage as linguistic mind control and propaganda is brilliantly analyzed by Graeme MacQueen in the penultimate chapter of his very important book, The 2001Anthrax Deception. He notes the patterned use of this term before and after September 11, while saying “the pattern may not signify a grand plan …. It deserves investigation and contemplation.” He then presents a convincing case that the use of this term couldn’t be accidental.  He notes how George W. Bush, in a major foreign policy speech on May 1, 2001, “gave informal public notice that the United States intended to withdraw unilaterally from the ABM Treaty”; Bush said the U.S. must be willing to “rethink the unthinkable.” This was necessary because of terrorism and rogue states with “weapons of mass destruction.” PNAC also argued that the U.S. should withdraw from the treaty. A signatory to the treaty could only withdraw after giving six months’ notice and because of “extraordinary events” that “jeopardized its supreme interests.” Once the September 11 attacks occurred, Bush rethought the unthinkable and officially gave formal notice on December 13 to withdraw the U.S. from the ABM Treaty, as previously noted. MacQueen specifies the many times different media used the term “unthinkable” in October 2001 in reference to the anthrax attacks. He explicates its usage in one of the anthrax letters – “The Unthinkabel” [sic].  He explains how the media that used the term so often were at the time unaware of its usage in the anthrax letter since that letter’s content had not yet been revealed, and how the letter writer had mailed the letter before the media started using the word. He makes a rock solid case showing the U.S. government’s complicity in the anthrax attacks and therefore in the Sept 11 attacks. While calling the use of the term “unthinkable” in all its iterations “problematic,” he writes, “The truth is that the employment of ‘the unthinkable’ in this letter, when weight is given both to the meaning of this term in U.S. strategic circles and to the other relevant uses of the term in 2001, points us in the direction of the U.S. military and intelligence communities.” I am reminded of Orwell’s point in 1984: “a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words.”  Thus the government and media’s use of “unthinkable” becomes a classic case of “doublethink.” The unthinkable is unthinkable.
5. 9/11. This is the key usage that has reverberated down the years around which the others revolve. It is an anomalous numerical designation applied to an historical event, and obviously also the emergency telephone number.  Try to think of another numerical appellation for an important event in American history. It’s impossible. But if you have a good historical sense, you will remember that the cornerstone for the Pentagon was lain on September 11, 1941, three months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and that the CIA engineered a coup against the Allende government in Chile on Sept 11, 1973. Just strange coincidences? The future editor of th New York Times and Iraq war promoter, Bill Keller, introduced the emergency phone connection on the morning of September 12 in a NY Times op-ed piece, “America’s Emergency Line: 911.” The linkage of the attacks to a permanent national emergency was thus subliminally introduced, as Keller mentioned Israel nine times and seven times compared the U.S. situation to that of Israel as a target for terrorists. His first sentence reads: “An Israeli response to America’s aptly dated wake-up call might well be, ‘Now you know.’” By referring to September 11 as 9/11, an endless national emergency fear became wedded to an endless war on terror aimed at preventing Hitler-like terrorists from obliterating us with nuclear weapons that could create another ground zero or holocaust. Mentioning Israel (“America is proud to be Israel’s closest ally and best friend in the world,” George W. Bush would tell the Israeli Knesset) so many times, Keller was not very subtly performing an act of legerdemain with multiple meanings. By comparing the victims of the 11 September attacks to Israeli “victims,” he was implying, among other things, that the Israelis are innocent victims who are not involved in terrorism, but are terrorized by Palestinians, as Americans are terrorized by fanatical Muslims.  Palestinians =  Al Qaeda. Israel = U.S. Explicit and implicit parallels of the guilty and the innocent.  Keller tells us who the real killers are. His use of the term 9/11 is a term that pushes all the right buttons, evoking unending social fear and anxiety. It is language as sorcery. It is propaganda at its best. Even well-respected critics of the U.S. government’s explanation use the term that has become a fixture of public consciousness through endless repetition. As George W. Bush would later put it as he connected Saddam Hussein to “9/11” and pushed for the Iraq war, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”  All the ingredients for a linguistic mind-control smoothie had been blended.

I have concluded – and this is impossible to prove definitively because of the nature of such propagandistic techniques – that the use of all these words/numbers is part of a highly sophisticated linguistic mind-control campaign waged to create a narrative that has lodged in the minds of hundreds of millions of people and is very hard to dislodge.

It is why I don’t speak of “9/11” any more. I refer to those events as the attacks of September 11, 2001, which is a mouth-full and not easily digested in the age of Twitter and texting. But I am not sure how to be more succinct or how to undo the damage, except by writing what I have written here.

Lance de Haven-Smith puts it well in Conspiracy Theory in America:

The rapidity with which the new language of the war on terror appeared and took hold; the synergy between terms and their mutual connections to WW II nomenclatures; and above all the connections between many terms and the emergency motif of “9/11” and “9-1-1” – any one of these factors alone, but certainly all of them together – raise the possibility that work on this linguistic construct began long before 9/11….It turns out that elite political crime, even treason, may actually be official policy.

Needless to say, his use of the words “possibility” and “may” are in order when one sticks to strict empiricism. However, when one reads his full text, it is apparent to me that he considers these “coincidences” part of a conspiracy.  I have also reached that conclusion.

As Thoreau put in his underappreciated humorous way, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

The evidence for linguistic mind control, while the subject of this essay, does not stand alone, of course. It underpins the actual attacks of September 11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks that are linked. The official explanations for these events by themselves do not stand up to elementary logic and are patently false, as proven by thousands of well-respected professional researchers from all walks of life – i.e. engineers, pilots, scientists, architects, and scholars from many disciplines (see the upcoming 9/11 Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation by David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth, to be released September 11, 2018). To paraphrase the prescient Vince Salandria, who said it long ago concerning the government’s assassination of President Kennedy, the attacks of 2001 are “a false mystery concealing state crimes.”  If one objectively studies the 2001 attacks together with the language adopted to explain and preserve them in social memory, the “mystery” emerges from the realm of the unthinkable and becomes utterable. “There is no mystery.” The truth becomes obvious.

How to communicate this when the corporate mainstream media serve the function of the government’s mockingbird (as in Operation Mockingbird), repeating and repeating and repeating the same narrative in the same language; that is the difficult task we are faced with, but there are signs today that breakthroughs are occurring, as growing numbers of international academic scholars are pushing to incorporate the analysis of the official propaganda surrounding 11 September 2001 into their work within the academy, a turnabout from years of general silence. And more and more people are coming to realize that the official lies about 11 September are the biggest example of fake news in this century. Fake news used to justify endless wars and the slaughter of so many innocents around the world.

Words have a power to enchant and mesmerize. Linguistic mind-control, especially when linked to traumatic events such as the September 11^th and the anthrax attacks, can strike people dumb and blind. It often makes some subjects “unthinkable” and “unspeakable” (to quote Jim Douglass quoting Thomas Merton in JFK and the Unspeakable: the unspeakable “is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said.”).

We need a new vocabulary to speak of these terrible things. Let us learn, as Chief Joseph said, to speak with a straight tongue, and in language that doesn’t do the enemies work of mind control, but snaps the world awake to the truth of the mass murders of September 11, 2001 that have been used to massacre millions across the world.

Postscript September 2026

• Analysis
  • 9/11: What Aren’t We Being Told?
  • 9/11 Source Bibliography
• Films
  • The Implications of 9/11. A conversation with John Judge,
    Part 1 & Part 2, 2 Fep 2002 (57:53 & 58:36).
  • September 11 and Future Wars, 19 Sep 2002 (2:10:55).
  • 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq: Unanswered Questions of September 11 –
    Part 1 & Part 2, 10 Oct 2002 (1:21:57 & 1:53:23) .

• The Pentagon’s B-Movie – Looking Closely at the September 2001 Attacks, Graeme MacQueen, 2023.
• Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World, David Ray Griffin, 2011.
• 9/11 Ten Years Later: When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed, David Ray Griffin, 2011.
• 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press, David Ray Griffin, 2008.
• The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, Peter Dale Scott, 2007.
• The Terror Timeline: Year By Year, Day By Day, minute By Minute: A Comprehensive Chronicle Of The Road To 9/11 —And America’s Response, Paul Thompson and the Center for Cooperative Research, 2004. See Also: History Commons 9/11 Timeline.

These links will bring readers to a vast interconnected and diverse series of articles, books, and videos about September 11, 2001 (and much more). ratical.org, run by David Ratcliffe, is an extraordinary encyclopedia of online sources unmatched anywhere. I urge readers to explore it. And I wish to thank Dave for his generous and ongoing help in documenting my writing. He is one of our world’s wonderful souls.

In a speech to the U.N. General Assembly on September 25, 1961, President John Kennedy said, “Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.”

A year later in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis this nearly came to pass. Today the threat is worse than ever. Madness reigns. Only the most naive can fail to recognize the warning signs. This is not hyperbole. Fooled on this score, we will be fooled no more.

Waiting For the Barbarians

By C.P. Cavafy

– What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are to arrive today.

– Why then such inactivity in the Senate?
Why do the Senators sit back and do not legislate?

Because the barbarians will arrive today.
What sort of laws now can Senators enact?
When the barbarians come, they’ll do the legislating.

– Why is our emperor up so early,
and seated at the grandest gate of our city, upon the throne,
in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians will arrive today.
And the emperor expects to receive their leader.
He has even prepared to present him
with a parchment scroll where he has
invested him with many names and titles.

– Why have our two consuls and the praetors come out
today in their purple, embroidered togas;
why did they put on bracelets studded with amethysts,
and rings with resplendent, glittering emeralds;
why are they carrying today precious staves
beautifully worked in gold and silver?

Because the barbarians will arrive today
and such things dazzle the barbarians.

– And why don’t our distinguished orators come out as usual
to give their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians will arrive today;
and they are bored by rhetoric and public speeches.

– Why this sudden commotion, this confusion?
(How solemn people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and the squares emptying so quickly,
and everyone is returning home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some of our men have arrived from the frontiers,
and say that there are no barbarians anymore.

—And now, what will become of us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

This poem was written in 1898.

This article was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2026 at 8:00am and is filed under 9-11, Conspiracy, Crimes against Humanity, Donald Trump, George W. Bush, John F. Kennedy, Narrative, Osama Bin Laden, Propaganda, The Lobby, United States, US Congress, War.