Many Media on site at WTC reported exlosions before the towers fell

[philb]

Many Media on site at WTC reported exlosions and witnesses to explosions before the towers fell
http://www.flcv.com/wtcmedia.html

so why was there no followup investigations?
http://www.flcv.com/coverup.html

[smirkymonkey]

1. That's what I don't get - how can there be this many witnesses

asserting that there were explosions in the building prior to the collapse, yet so many people willing to accept the official story.

[petgoat]

3. so many people willing to accept the official story

Only a small percentage of US citizens have ever even been to NYC, and
many of those who cling to the official story have positively
hostile feelings about it. All those blacks and Puerto Ricans and...
Democrats! All those drugs and all that pointy-headed culture! The
art, and the music and the publishing! In the culture war, NYC is
seen as the capital of liberal culture--and thus the enemy.

Few Americans outside of NYC have ever heard the reports of
explosions, and few are capable of rationally considering the
information. When I first saw the pictures of the squibs, I wrote
them off as a photoshop hoax, someone's twisted joke. I, like most
people, assumed that explosives=government complicity=loony conspiracy
theory.

I couldn't face the explosive evidence myself until I de-linked it
from complicity by supposing that al Qaeda operatives planted the
charges. I'd learned from Webster Tarpley's book of Hugo Bachmann's
theory that "explosive tenants" might have planted explosives, and
remembering that some tenants used their offices as warehouses, I was
able to consider the possibility that al Qaeda operatives evaded
sleepy security guards and planted the charges in the middle of the
night, perhaps over a period of weeks.


http://educate-yourself.org/cn/collapseofWTCeyewitnessreportsexplosions07feb05.shtml

[petgoat]

2. Why no media followup?

Dan Rather said:

"...Self-censorship.... starts with a feeling of patriotism within
oneself.... And one finds oneself saying: 'I know the right question,
but you know what? This is not exactly the right time to ask it'."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2002/05_may/16/dan_rather.shtml

Rena Golden, executive VP of CNN Int'l, said the American press had
censored itself on both 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan. "Anyone who
claims the US media didn't censor itself is kidding you. And this
isn't just a CNN issue — every journalist who was in any way involved
in 9/11 is partly responsible."

http://vancouver.indymedia.org/news/2004/06/141355.php


Bill Moyers said:

The Chicago Tribune recently conducted a national poll in which about
half of those surveyed said there should be been some kind of press
restraint on reporting about the prison abuse scandal in Iraq; I
suggest those people don’t want the facts to disturb their belief
system about American exceptionalism. The poll also found that five or
six of every ten Americans “would embrace government controls of some
kind on free speech, especially if it is found unpatriotic.”


http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0917-02.htm

Peter Coyote said a friend in cbs, a news show producer, told him the
media were in "lock-down" mode about the election irregularities
story, and that similar lock-down orders came down at the time of the
Iraq invasion.

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/2004Coyote.html



Bush said "You're either with us or you're against us" and told the UN
on November 10, 2001 "Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy
theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies
that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves,
away from the guilty."

There was a tendency to with-hold judgement. "Let's wait until all
the facts are in." And while we waited, the evidence was destroyed.

[Beam Me Up]

4. Exactly. The CON (corporate owned news) is not our friend. Their function

is not to educate the public but to manipulate and shape public opinion and social self perception. It reflects to us 'who we are'. That is, who they want us to be, which is, after all, mostly CONSUMERS of their reality. Everything is packaged and sold to us by attracting our attention and holding it.

Now, of course, there is room for discussion within a limited circle. Chomsky said it this way:

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum -- even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

We hear a lot of talk about this vs that (right vs left, christian vs atheist, men vs women, black vs white, etc., etc.) but we hear very little in the mainstream about elitests vs the working class or the effects decisions made behind closed doors in board rooms or bilderberger meetings or the world bank have upon the lives of ordinary people. That right there tells us a little something about the real structures of power behind the facade of politics.

[petgoat]

5. The Lively Debate and Class Conflict

Chomsky's "Lively Debate" is Fox News's "shouting heads" format which
covers over real issues with a lot of noise. This convention serves
the Republicans in a couple of ways:

1) it facilitates the notion that everything is just an opinion and
since there are no facts one opinion is pretty much as good as another,
so what are you going to do?

2) it creates confusion and the fear of a chaotic world to which the
only reasonable response is a strong military, social discipline, and
fear of God.

Martin Schotz's book "History Will Not Absolve Us" asserts that
holding American citizens in a state of confusion in which anything
can be believed, but nothing can be known for sure, is one of the
primary means of keeping us politically impotent. We are allowed to
believe anything, but we are allowed to know nothing--but that's okay
with most of us, because knowing might bring the obligation to do
something.

http://spot.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/14th_Issue/history.html

This also, as you perceptively point out, has the effect of
distracting us from class issues. The right wing has made "class
warfare" a pre-emptive charge useful against any proposal to increase
the rich's taxes, and seeks to pretend that any class conflicts exist.
Thomas Frank discusses this quite a bit in "What's the Matter With
Kansas." The lower class Bushites vote on the basis of culture
issues and ignore the fact that they're voting against their own
economic well-being.

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=17266

[philb]

6. hundreds of witnesses to explosions before the towers fell

http:\\www.flcv.com/wtcwitne.html