Dr. Anthony Hall VT, 10-14-14… “Dr. Gareth Porter and 9/11 Truth in Tehran”

Another piece from VT about the recent Tehran conference. A fairly extensive read, but I feel it’s important to see how other countries support investigation and discussion of topics “forbidden” in others

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Dr. Gareth Porter and 9/11 Truth in Tehran

Deconstructing the Propaganda and Subversion Underling the “Axis of Evil” Lies 

Dr. Gareth Porter was the featured independent thinker at the recent New Horizon International Conference of Independent Thinkers and Film Makers. I also too took part in the proceedings. Between Sept. 27 and Oct. 4 I moved back and forth between Lethbridge Alberta and Tehran, the capital city of the Islamic Republic of Iran. For six of those days I was hosted along with other delegates in a hotel beside a very busy, beautiful and heavily wooded park in downtown Tehran.

The conference’s hosts possessed the vision, influence and organizational  skills to put together what was, in my view, by far the most free and substantial discussion on global relationships of power I have ever witnessed, let alone taken part in. Unfortunately, I cannot picture the possibility of this kind of free exchange between leading experts in their fields– real experts, not pampered academic and journalistic sycophants– taking place in Europe or North America these days. The hysterical, finger-pointing response of the conference’s main critics offers proof of the severity of the blacklisting, censorship and stifling of free expression in many of our home countries

Dr. Porter was given the honour of formally introducing his import an new book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare during the proudly-religious opening ceremonies replete with many state dignitaries. The decision was entirely appropriate to highlight the published outcome of Dr. Porter’s deep investigations into the cynical political manipulation of the imagery connected to Iran’s nuclear energy program. The larger international context within which the New Horizon conference took place found vivid reflections in some of the main themes of Dr. Porter’s work on what he has dubbed “the Iran Nuclear Scare.”

The book behind Dr. Porter’s Tehran presentation is very significant and timely. The text has already been translated into Farsi, Persia’s first language. The second New Horizon conference took place in Tehran just as the international negotiation on Iran’s relationship to nuclear power reached yet another threshold of controversy. The nuclear negotiations have paired Iranian officials with delegations from the five permanent members of the UN’s Security Council plus Germany.

As I came to see it, the New Horizon conference of 2014 taking place in the nation state and ancient civilization lying at the cross-roads of the world held out the possibility of a people-to-people quest for viable Middle Ground in the trading ideas and perspectives. This quest of global citizens for middle ground stands in stark contrast to the unilateralism of the imposed commercial embargoes on the people and government of the Islamic Republic. As Dr. Porter makes clear in his extended reflections on one “manufactured crisis” set among a large set of similar manufactured crises, the main power behind the international animosity pointed at Iran clearly resides in Israel, the emerging imperial capital of a new round of colonial expansionism.

“A who’s who of the world’s leading anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers,

9/11 conspiracy theorists and anti-American propagandists?”

The leadership of the Islamic Republic has been subject to an unrelenting barrage of accusations that the Iranian government is secretly conniving to extend its nuclear energy program into a program for the design and production of nuclear weapons. A detailed demonstration of the many-layered fraudulence permeating this portrayal forms the main substance of Dr. Porter’s  investigative reporting now brought to fruition in Manufactured Crisis.

Dr. Porter’s work on Manufactured Crisis seems to have become part of the very manufactured crisis he has identified. When I returned to Canada I learned from a BuzzFeed News article of Oct. 6 that Dr. Porter had aimed angry recriminations at the very conference organizers that had honoured him. In a missive that I intend to discuss in more detail in a future essay, Dr. Porter crudely condemned the conference’s focus on the relationship between the Jewish state of Israel and the events of 9/11. In doing so he implicitly criticized the conference organizers’ insistence on choosing delegates with the necessary expertise to highlight the systemic manipulation of Islam as epitomized by the US executive branch’s designation in 2002 of the Islamic Republic of Iran as the core polity in a diabolical “Axis of Evil.”

This manipulation Islamic people, theology and sectarian differences extends to the production and dissemination of negative images of Islam to maintain and advance the geopolitical dominance of power elites in “the West.” It extends to recruiting, arming, training, organizing and directing Muslim or ostensibly Muslim mercenary soldiers to commit violent acts exploited through media propaganda to justify invasions abroad and police star crackdowns at home, all in the name of anti-terrorism. It extends to setting up Islamic individuals as patsies to be blamed for trigger events that give false justification for predatory actions including aggressive warfare.

The preeminent and prototypical example of this type of action occurred on Sept. 11, 2001. On the infamous day of 9/11 an elaborate but highly-flawed operation put the Shock Doctrine into action. Within hours of the shocking images broadcast live from New York and Washington the serial catastrophes were diagnosed as the outcome of the actions of 19 Saudi citizens equipped with nothing more than box cutters, some rudimentary flight training, and ample amounts of jihadist zeal. There was more. The whole operation was said to be directed by Osama bin Laden from a cave in Afghanistan.

In fact the attacks of the supposedly hijacked passenger planes on Wall Street and the Pentagon were so large in scale, so complex and high-tech in nature, that they could not have possibly been carried out without the extensive involvement and expertise of key elements of the world’s most powerful military-industrial complex and its attending national security state

Dr. Porter’s harsh criticisms of the conference’s organizers and the majority of it participants have helped fuel, sustain and legitimize a significant firestorm of negative mainstream media coverage set off by press releases issued first by Abe Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League and then by Illinois Senator Mark Kirk.[ii]

In fairness it is important to note that Dr. Porter was himself singled out in these press releases. Senator Kirk specifically described Dr. Porter as a “Cambodian genocide denier” whereas Abe Foxman’s ADL advanced a more modest slur referring to the investigate reporter and scholar simply as an “anti-Israeli journalist.” In its second press release the ADL explained to the media, “Among the speak­ers on the first day of the con­fer­ence was anti-Israel jour­nal­ist Garth Porter. In his speech to the atten­dees, Porter lev­eled accu­sa­tions against Israel, the Mossad and CIA for man­u­fac­tur­ing the Iran­ian nuclear cri­sis. Brazil­ian jour­nal­ist Pepe Esco­bar echoed Porter’s mes­sage and pre­dicted that Iran will become more active in world affairs as its stature and influ­ence in the region increases.”[http://blog.adl.org/international/details-emerge-on-anti-semitic-gathering-in-tehran]

Senator Kirk brought together all the seemingly disparate ingredients of this strange narrative brew on October 2. The US politician reported, “the Second Annual ‘New Horizon’ conference in Tehran this week brought together former Iranian nuclear negotiators with a who’s who of the world’s leading anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists and anti-American propagandists.”

Extrapolating Senator Kirk’s words, neo-con columnist Jennifer Rubin argued in the Washington Post that “The so-called ‘New Horizon’ conference in Tehran proves why the current Iranian regime under President Hassan Rouhani is, at its core, no less extremist and dangerous than the regime under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.” In the election in 2013 of former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was defeated by now-President Hassan Rouhani. President Rouhani is widely perceived as a more moderate pragmatist than his outspoken and flamboyant presidential predecessor, a college professor and former mayor of Tehran.

One of the first acts on the international stage of the new Iranian president was to cancel a prior version of the conference that finally took place during the early autumn of 2014. The shift from Ahmadinejad to Rouhani, however, only tells part of the story because in the Islamic Republic the constitution places the overarching theocratic authority over the Muslim state in a divinely-sanctioned religious custodian of Iranian sovereignty.

The  Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic is now Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei. Our group of independent thinkers learned during a tour of the Ebrat Museum, the circular building that housed the Shah of Iran’s state-of-the-art torture chamber, that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was among the group of clerics detained and tortured by SAVAK, the Shah’s of Iran’s notorious secret police. During the early days of his years of his reign the Shah turned his secret police primarily against known or suspected communists. Later, however, the US-backed puppet turned his formidable instruments of domestic repression primarily toward the several hundred followers of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, himself exiled in Paris until he returned to Tehran in 1979 to lead the triumphant Islamic revolution on the sacred ground of Persian civilization.

During our guided tour of one of the world’s most important museums of torture we learned that many of the Shah’s crimes against humanity were implemented by the the US-Israeli-Iranian “Beast of Ebram,” Parviz Sabeti, aka Peter Sabeti. After the tour one of our group, star investigative reporter Wayne Madsen, returned home to see what he could learn about Sabeti. Wayne’s alway’s penetrating research led him to discover that Parviz Sabeti, an international criminal of the first order, is currently living in Orlando Florida as a triple Iranian-Israeli-US citizen. [http://milfuegos.blogspot.ca/2014/10/meet-us-israeli-iranian-beast-of-ebrat.html]

 

In Tehran Dr. Porter Discovered His Apparent Acceptance of Official Cover Story of 9/11

Puts Him in a Small Minority

The New Horizon conference’s primary champion, organizer, Chair and visionary is Nader Talebzadeh, an award-winning filmmaker and the popular host of a very important public affairs show on Iranian TV. Educated in part in New York at Columbia University’s School of Film Making, the fluently multilingual Nader Talebzadeh came to prominence as a chronicler of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Among his many and varied cinematic achievements is “Messiah,”a feature film depicting the life of Jesus from an Islamic perspective. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEjrTCRABMI]

Last year Mr. Talebzadeh organized a more modest international conference in Tehran on “Hollywoodism.” The participants in this event focused primarily on the operations of the American film industry, site of a classic global exercise of US soft power. More subtle than the invasive actions of Armed Forces, the incursions of Hollywoodism can nevertheless sometimes invade minds, imaginations and systems of ethics and belief in insidious, assimilative and disempowering ways.

Dr. Porter outlined his criticism of the New Horizon conference in an article by Rosie Gray published on Oct. 6 in BuzzFeed News. The article’s subtitle is, “Gareth Porter says he never would have gone to a conspiracy conference in Tehran if he had known the real views of fellow attendees.” In his quoted comments Dr Porter indicates, “during a previous trip I was on [Nader Talebzadeh’s] show, and had no indication that he held extremist views on either conspiracy theories about 9/11 or Jews.”

Did I inadvertently play a role in Dr. Porter’s negative assessment of the conference attendees? Maybe. The subject of 9/11 came up during a return trip by car from our tour of the former US Embassy, now Tehran’s “Nest of Spies Museum.” In the driver’s seat was Hamed Gashgavi, one of the key point persons on the staff of the conference’s host organization. Also in the front seat was Rev. Stephen Sizer, a very important advocate of Palestinian rights in Great Britain. At the New Horizon conference Rev. Sizer, a Church of England Vicar, was the primary Christian ambassador to what could be seen through a lens of religious interpretation as an ecumenical event hosted by the Islamic Republic’s leadership. Rev. Sizer is also a well published expert on Christian Zionism.

In the back seat Thierry Meyssan, one of my favourite interpreters of global geopolitics, sat between Dr. Porter and myself. The exchange on 9/11 began with a discussion about the current ineffectiveness of the North American and European anti-war movements.

Dr. Porter contrasted the present situation with the successes of the anti-war protest movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, when public pressure was mounted to end the US Armed Forces intervention in the former French colonies of Indochina, Christian churches helped give the peace movement the strength of conviction and organizational coherence.

I took Dr. Porter’s comment as an opening to advance a position that has been most fully developed by Prof. Graeme MacQueen, founder of the Peace Studies Department at McMaster University in Canada. I argued that one of the reasons for the current failures of the anti-war movement has to do with the aversion of its leadership to deal critically and honestly with the actual substance of what really happened and what didn’t happen on 9/11. In my estimation it is not good enough to restrict the anti-war movement’s public narrative to condemnation of the war mongering that has has occurred after 9/11.

I made it clear to Dr. Porter that in my view the foundation-funded peace movement has not dealt intelligently, forthrightly, or courageously with the actual content of the main event underlying the ongoing 9/11 wars. The most recent manifestation of the ongoing 9/11 wars is presently on full global display in the second US-led military attack on Iraq. This second attack is directed as well at continuing the offensive effort to overthrow the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. I asked Dr. Porter how the leadership of the peace movement in North America and Europe can credibly oppose the perversity of a war or series of wars without addressing the underlying causes of the conflict. How can the anti-war movement be effective without getting to the bottom of the issue of who really did what to whom and for what reasons? Who are the real culprits when it comes to the lies and crimes of 9/11?

Dr. Porter responded in a quite aggressive way, seemingly treating my observation as being more like a personal insult than a genuine attempt to diagnose a systemic problem. He answered me with a comment that I interpreted as a poor attempt to imitate the bombastic Alex Jones.  “You mean inside job,” Dr. Porter sneered as if the mere invocation of this simplistic slogan was sufficient justification to end the conversation.

Those of us at the conference who do not reject the label imposed upon us as “9/11 truthers” naturally experience this kind of put down frequently put on us  in our home countries. But I was surprised to encounter this kind of dismissive and closed response from the featured independent thinker of the New Horizon delegates assembled in Tehran. It seemed to me Dr. Porter, a world authority on the dynamics of a very elaborate manufactured crisis imposed on the Islamic Republic, was implicitly expressing his faith in the veracity of the US government’s account of what happened on 9/11. What is Dr. Porter’s position on the events of 9/11, a hotly contested topic internationally and globally by any reasonable standard. At the New Horizon conference of 2014, Dr. Porter’s apparent trust in the findings of the 9/11 Commission, if that is indeed his stance, is a minority position.

The exchange in the car did not end there. I pointed out to my American colleague that he was sitting right beside the author of the first analytical book on 9/11, L’Effroyable imposture, or, in English, 9/11: The Big Lie. On this subject I suggested Gareth Porter might learn something from the the charming and incredibly erudite Thierry Meyssen. Currently domiciled in Damascus, Meysssen’s approach to research, analysis, publication and public discourse is entirely different from that of the American broadcaster, Alex Jones. I suspected the primary voice of Infowars symbolized Dr. Porter’s negative stereotype of a typical 9/11 truther. But this is merely assumption and speculation. I therefore invite Dr.Porter to explain his position on 9/11 in his own words

9/11 Skeptism, Jonathan Kay, Iran’s Nuclear Energy Program,

and the Likudnik Foundation for the Defense of Democracies 

When we returned to the hotel Thierry Meyssan, Kevin Barrett and I discussed the episode. My colleagues chalked up what had just taken place to the particular difficulties that arise when trying to discuss 9/11 Skepticism with many American public intellectuals.

Earlier in the formal proceedings of the conference Thierry Meyssen acknowledged that he was wrong in some aspects of his initial interpretation of what had happened on 9/11. Thierry had initially attributed the directing impetus of the 9/11 false flag trigger event to elements within the US government. Like many truthers, myself included, I believe Meyssan has come to embrace a growing consensus that elements in the government of Likudnik Israel together with the Bushite cabal of neocon operatives, many of whom are dual US-Israeli citizens, most probably gave the directing hand to “the New Pearl Harbor” that happened on 9/11.

Unlike Thierry Meyssan it took me many years to begin to question the official cover story first delivered without any formal investigation at all on the very morning of 9/11. I gave my first public presentation on 9/11 skepticism in the autumn of 2008 on a public platform I shared with Dr. Kevin Barrett in Edmonton Alberta. After going public with my 9/11 skepticism I began to notice that the most concerted push back invariably came from people, groups or media organizations with strong ties to Israel.

Many of the smear attacks directed my way and at my then-graduate student, Joshua Blakeney, emanated from Jonathan Kay, an editor of Canada’s National Post. This newspaper was founded by Conrad Black, former owner of a media chain that included the Jersalem Post. It was Conrad Black that hired Jonathan Kay as a journalist after the young man’s graduation from Yale University’s Law School and his failed career as a metallurgist. As I see it, the political personae of Canada’s current Christian Zionist Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, was largely invented in the National Post much like the political personae of Christian Zionist Tony Blair was largely invented in the British media operations of Rupert Murdoch.

Jonathan Kay was given backing by the Tel Aviv-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies to write a book devoted to smearing 9/11 truthers as part of a larger group of “underground conspiracists” deemed by the author to be suffering grave symptoms of a shared mental illness. Many of the senior fellows of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies had formerly been members of the Project for the New American Century, the think tank that promoted many of the initiatives that were immediately implemented after 9/11.

The old Cold War media strategy of guilt-by-association is made very clear in the title of Kay’s book. The title of the original Canadian edition is Among the Truthers: A Journey into the Growing Conspiracist Underground of 9/11 Truthers, Birthers, Armageddonites, Vaccine Hysterics, Hollywood Know-Nothings and Internet Addicts. In his introduction Kay explained that his book would not address the actual evidence of what did or did not happen on 9/11. He claims that his editor had indicated such an exercise would be too boring for a large readership.

Jonathan Kay has frequently tried to smear in the National Post my efforts and those of Joshua Blakeney to expand the frontiers of 9/11 truth. Kay’s smear and disinformation seemed somehow related to an episode in Winnipeg Manitoba. Winnipeg is home to a fairly large and old Canadian  Jewish community that includes the proudly Zionist Asper clan whose patriarch, the late Izzy Asper, acquired the National Post plus a chain of other Canadian media outlets from Conrad Black before the disgraced media mogul was sentenced to serve time in a US prison.

In March of 2009 I gave an invited lecture at the University of Winnipeg. Entitled, “Should George W. Bush Be Arrested in Calgary Alberta and Charged with International Crimes?,” the text of the presentation was published on a number of sites including Thierry Meyssen’s Voltairenet. After the presentation I was surrounded and entrapped by a group of prominent Winnipeg women, all of them Jewish, and presented with the printout of a stylized swastika that had published on a web page called Montreal 9/11 Truth. The Montreal 9/11 Truth group had published some of my article. The image I was shown was made actually to declared the anti-fascist position of the 9/11 truthers in Montreal. The facts of the matter, however, were clearly irrelevant to my inquisitors. An account of the episode appeared in the local Jewish community newspaper implying of course that I have Nazi sympathies, which I definitely do not.

The common denominator linking Jonathan Kay with the actions of the group that entrapped and acosted me at the University of Winnipeg is their shared attachments as Zionists to what they perceive as the best interests of Israel.

 

My research into the sponsor of Jonathan Kay’s book, Among the Truthers, leads me to a paragraph that caught my attention in Dr. Porter’s Manufactured Crisis. The author attributes much of the planning and design of the sold called “sanctions” imposed on the Islamic Republic largely to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. On page 289 of Manufactured Crisis Dr. Porter writes,

[In 2011] the Obama administration was initially uncertain about whether to support the the Israeli proposal to target Iran’s Central Bank and Iran’s oil exports, but the Israeli lobby in the United States forced the issue. The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington, DC-based organization whose policy positions are closely aligned with the Likud Party, had drafted legislation mandating such sanctions, and AIPAC was already mobilizing Congress to pass it. Then, on December 2, the Senate passed legislation mandating sanctions against Iran’s Central Bank and the export sector by a vote of 94 to 0. The administration knew that Israel was committed to seeing how those sanctions would play out in Iranian policy.

Questions about the possible role of Israel in the false flag trigger event of 9/11 are probably the greatest source of division within the 9/11 truth movement. One aspect of that division concerns whether calling for a credible investigation is a sufficient response to the Big Lie of 9/11 or whether it is necessary and wise to go the extra step and offer whodunnit scenarios. The opposition to those 9/11 skeptics who see the dual citizen Israeli-US neocons as primary suspects tend to be associated with the web site, 9/11 Blogger. They tend to gravitate around the work of Kevin Ryan who lost his career in the insurance business when he insisted on defending the organization that had certified the high grade steel forming the structural core of the Twin Towers. Doug Brinkman, who created the forum at the Edmonton public library where I shared a public podium with Kevin Barrett in 2008, has been incessant in chastising those of us who connect 9/11 to Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu has indicated 9/11 was good for Israel. Who benefited? Who had the motive? Who had the means”

 

An Axis of Enlightenment Find Expression in the Agenda of the New Horizon Conference

 

In a published letter to BuzzFeed’s reporter, Rosie Gray, Dr. Porter put on the record that “I did not participate in most of the conference sessions,” sessions that in his eyes included “a bewildering assorting of people and issues.” Perhaps if Dr. Porter had been more present at the conference proceedings even in sessions where he was not a featured presenter the American investigative reporter might have noticed a close bond of collegial and intellectual interaction between Mr. Talebzadeh and Dr. Kevin Barrett.

A devout Muslim himself, Dr. Barrett is also an accomplished Islamic scholar who is a native son of Wisconsin. Dr. Barrett’s academic career at the University of Wisconsin was cut short in 2006 after he started to draw attention in his teaching and subsequent public interventions to the vast distance between the empirically verifiable evidence concerning the events of 9/11 and the public fables and anti-Islam religious mythology deployed in the mass media to explain the debacle to the American public.

In my view Dr. Barrett is one of America’s leading analysts of the ongoing psychological operation flowing from the initial media misrepresentation of 9/11. Indeed, through constant study, including the knowledge he has gained from his amazing collection interviews without almost everyone who has something intelligent to say about 9/11 and its consequences, Dr. Barrett has made himself a world authority on the never-ending 9/11 wars. Like all wars, the 9/11 wars include intense psychological operations including those connected to the new ISIL war of imperial conquest on the moving eastern frontiers of the expanding Jewish settler state of Israel.

For the war machine to operate with the manufactured consent of the citizens that finance it and serve it, including with the blood of our young people, the top strategist must bring about the demonization and dehumanization especially Arab and Persian peoples as well as the worldwide community of Muslims. This psychological task requires the media division of the military-industrial complex to concoct an alternative universe of altered public perception far removed from realities. Thankfully these hidden realities, kept veiled in North America and Europe behind the so-called fog of war, were given a healthy and genuine airing in Tehran.

The Hollywoodized media’s unrelenting quest these days to instigate, exploit and deploy Islamophobia replicates many of the same motifs of media manipulation developed by Edward Bernays and others to marshal US public opinion as a friend of globalized corporate capitalism and as a foe indigenous self-determination in the course Cold War. In the shock doctrine governing the ongoing and now re-branded Global War on Terror, the tactics for stimulating Islamophobia have been made to replace the memes of anti-communism in the Cold War.

As I see it, this approach to the necessary study of the 9/11 wars forms the common ground on which Nader Talebzadeh and Kevin Barrett seem to have developed a strong basis of friendship, expert analysis, and collegial collaboration. No doubt many good people have had a hand in shaping the agenda of the New Horizon conference whose main subject matter so shocked the sensibilities of Dr. Porter. With that acknowledgement I believe that an Axis of Enlightenment coalesced in Tehran which showed up in the overall structure of the event. The placement of 9/11 Skepticism in the foreground was in my view a reflection of the obvious bonds of respect and shared understanding between Kevin Barrett and Nader Talebzadeh, both formidable Islam scholars and devotees in their own right. This Axis of Enlightenment also drew brilliance from the collaboration between Kevin with Arash Darya-Bandari, Secretary of Content Policy of the New Horizon conference and Chair of the panel on Israel and 9/11. I am proud to have been invited to make a brief presentation in that historic session.

The host of a regular Internet radio show with a modest but extremely dedicated following, Dr. Barrett is can easily be dismissed in the United States as marginal and insignificant figure. He has already been deemed crazy by the xenophobes and Islamophobes at Fox News crew even as he can easily be ignored by the likes of Dr. Porter, Chris Hedges, Matt Taibbi or Prof. Noam Chomsky.

In Tehran, however, it was a different story. Seemingly falling back on his prejudices attached to the slogan, “Inside Job,” it was Gareth Porter who found himself marginalized and isolated at the conference. On the other hand Kevin Barrett who tended to speak for the majority on 9/11 as our truthjihad contributed significantly to the success of the New Horizon proceedings in Tehran.