On the contrary, it is urgent, particularly in the United States, because of Washington's primary role in accelerating the race to destruction by extending its historically unique military dominance.
(c) 2005 Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author, most recently, of Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance.

It was all expected: both the massacre and the questions it raised. But behind the easy questions that practically posed themselves, much more difficult and unasked questions are hidden.

The General Security Service (Shabak, a.k.a. Shin Bet) has been warning for a long time that the "disengagement" from Gaza could lead to an outbreak of Jewish terrorism, aiming at preventing the evacuation of the settlements. It also outlined three possible scenarios: the murder of the Prime Minister, an outrage against the holy mosques on the Temple Mount and a massacre of Arabs.

Among these three possibilities, the massacre of Arabs is the easiest and most effective. It aims at causing riots and compelling the police to move forces away from the arena of the disengagement, thus preventing them from evacuating the settlements.

The murderous act of Eden Nathan-Zadeh does, indeed, conform to this model. He got on a bus going to an Arab town (Shefaram), killed four Israeli Arab citizens and was beaten to death by the enraged crowd. The police was compelled to move more than a thousand officers from the disengagement area in the south to Galilee in the north, making it easier for right-wing activists to infiltrate Gush Katif.

The easy questions arose at once. If the Shin Bet knew enough to warn of the danger, why did it not increase its surveillance of the extreme rightists, whose identity and haunts are known to it? After all, the murderer was staying in Tapuakh settlement, the snake-pit of the Kach militants, whose murderous character is notorious. The murderer himself was arrested several times in the course of extreme right-wing activities in the past. And why didn't the army act, in spite of the fact that the commanders of the murderer knew that he had deserted in protest against the disengagement, taking his rifle with him? Indeed, his mother, who foresaw what was coming, bombarded the army with requests to find him and take the weapon away from him.

These are the easy questions.

But there are other questions, whose answers are more complex.

Why are the Kach people allowed to strut around like the kings of the realm? The Kach group was officially declared a terrorist organization and outlawed some 12 years ago. This means that anyone belonging to it, supporting it or assisting it with money or in any other way, is legally considered a terrorist. (This is precisely the law under which Sheik Ra'ed Salah, the mayor of the Israeli Arab town Um-al-Fahem, was imprisoned for two years.) ,P> Kach ("So" in Hebrew) is, by any standard, a religious-fascist group. It advocates the murder of Arabs, revenge killings, the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel and Palestine and an extreme anti-democratic regime. It maintains a leader-cult for its founder, Meir Kahane, who was shot by an Arab in the United States, and sanctifies Baruch Goldstein, the man who committed mass-murder in the Hebron mosque.

But for years now, the Kach people have been roving the country without hindrance and have committed numberless outrages against Israeli Arab citizens and inhabitants of the occupied Palestinian territories. From time to time one of their thugs is arrested, only to be released again after a few days. If one of them is put on trial at all, the trial turns into farce. In this game of cat and mouse, it is not quite clear who plays the cat and who the mouse.

Worse still: throughout these years, the Kach people have been treated like TV stars. They voice their boasts and messages of incitement on air and are frequently interviewed, always with captions like "Kach activist", "Kahane Lives activist" or "Member of the former Kach". They appear at the funerals of victims of Palestinian attacks and trials of Arab defendants, and shout "Death to the Arabs". They use television openly as an instrument for recruiting new members and poisoning the minds of future recruits.

It is impossible to travel in Israel without coming across the face of Meir Kahane on posters and graffiti. Slogans like "Kahane Was Right" and "Death to the Arabs", with the emblem of the threatening fist, appear on many walls throughout the country, and especially in Jerusalem, Hebron and Kiryat Arba. Nobody takes the trouble to remove them.

How is this possible? Very simple: as in certain other countries, like Germany in the 20s and 30s (the hapless "Weimar Republic"), Police and judges treat the Fascists as "misguided patriots", "good fellows who got carried away", more in sorrow than in anger.

The simple truth is that the semi-secret government organs that have been overseeing the illegal settlement activities for decades, use the Kach people for their purposes. Only thus can one explain the existence of openly Kahanist settlements, one of which is the rotten apple (Tapuakh means apple).

A little bit more difficult to answer is the question concerning the "Repentant Jews": why do so many of the Jewish terrorists come from this group?

This is a sect within a sect that has given birth to some of the most dangerous Jewish political murderers.

The religious camp in Israel consists of two parts: The Haredim ("trembling before God"), who continue the tradition of Orthodox Judaism of the Diaspora, and Religious Zionism that developed in this country. The great majority of "Religious Zionists" constitute, for all practical purposes, a sect. They bear little resemblance to traditional Judaism. It can be said that they are a mutation of Judaism, made in Israel.

The Haredim have a highly ambivalent attitude towards the State of Israel. When Zionism was born in Europe, almost all the eminent rabbis cursed its founder, Theodor Herzl, accusing him of trying to supplant the Jewish religion with Jewish nationalism. The central theme of Zionism, the "Ingathering of the Exiles", was a cardinal heresy in the eyes of the Orthodox. Nowadays the Haredim are quite ready to milk the state for their purposes, but they forbid their pupils to celebrate Israel's Independence Day or respect its flag. And while many of their adherents have now been bitten by the nationalist bug, they were conspicuously absent from the recent big demonstrations against the disengagement. Their rabbis have forbidden them to take part.

"Religious Zionism", in contradistinction, has developed over the years into a messianic sect, much like the Zealots at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, some 1935 years ago. They have a direct line to God, Who tells them what to do. They "bring the Redemption" to put pressure on the messiah to come early. The settlements are their spearhead.

The "Repentant Jews" are an even more extreme sect. Traditional Judaism treats proselytes with suspicion ("Proselytes are as injurious to Israel as a scab", the Talmud says) and its attitude towards secular Jews who suddenly become pious is not much different. Most of the "repentance rabbis" preach a nationalist, out-of-this world, mystic, extreme and unbridled creed that completely negates the democratic system and calls for a "faith-based state".

This has been the breeding ground for most of the Jewish terrorists in recent years, the members of the various "Jewish undergrounds" and also the Shefaram murderer.

And the question is: why were these rabbis, some of them government employees, allowed to spread their venomous message, to poison the minds of young people, to incite against elected officials and to undermine the democratic system?

Another important question concerns the connection between the murderer and the opponents of the disengagement, and especially the so-called Yesha Council. (Yesha is the Hebrew acronym of "Judea, Samaria and Gaza". The Yesha Council is the self-appointed leadership of the settlers and is conducting the present struggle against the Gaza withdrawal.)

When one of the Yesha leaders was asked about this in a television interview, he exploded with anger. The very question is a terrible insult, he retorted, offending their honor, criminalizing them. Really?

True, the Yesha leaders are very shrewd. They know that if their followers hurt soldiers or police, they will lose whatever public support they have. They preach non-violence in all the media and on every occasion. Their main slogan is "We Love You". During their last two big demonstrations, they succeeded in reining in their flock. But anyone watching their demonstrations on TV saw the Kach people there flying the banners of Kahane. The presence of Repentant Jews, easily recognizable by their clothes and behavior, was very noticeable. The Yesha leaders seemed to have no objection to their presence.

Also, the Yesha leaders have never distanced themselves from the messages of incitement voiced by the extreme rabbis, who curse the Prime Minister, the government and the Knesset in a language that sows the seed of disaster in the minds of their followers. They cannot argue that they are unaware of the possible consequences: the murder of Yitzhak Rabin is a warning that no one can ignore.

When the Yesha leaders appeared on TV immediately after the Shefaram massacre, they mouthed the usual condemnation, but in mid-sentence they turned to the disengagement dispute and blamed Ariel Sharon for all the crimes.

The Tapuakh people claim that the murderer did not stay at their settlement recently, but had moved to Gush Katif. In the letter which the murderer wrote to his commander before deserting, he declared that he was not prepared to take part in the evacuation of the settlers there. And most importantly: the timing of the outrage itself leaves no doubt that it was aimed against the disengagement.

No verbal laundry can clear the Yesha Council from the responsibility for this act and the acts that will surely follow. The more the "civil disobedience" campaign of the extreme right proves a failure, the more the even-more-extreme right will turn to murderous violence.

Is it an accident that Yesha rhymes with Pesha, the Hebrew word for crime?
(c) 2005 Uri Avnery Gush Shalom

THE ONLY EVIDENCE you need that President Bush is losing the "war on terror" is this: On Sunday, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia said that relations with the United States "couldn't be better."

Tell that to the parents of those who have died in two wars defending this corrupt spawning ground of violent extremism. Never mind the ugly facts: We are deeply entwined with Saudi Arabia even though it shares none of our values and supports our enemies.

Yet on Friday, Bush's father and Vice President Dick Cheney made another in a long line of obsequious American pilgrimages to Riyadh to assure the Saudis that we continue to be grateful for the punishment they dish out.

"The relationship has tremendously improved with the United States," Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal told a news conference in Riyadh. "With the government, of course, it is very harmonious, as it ever was. Whether it has returned to the same level as it was before in terms of public opinion [in both countries], that is debatable."

Well, score one for public opinion. It makes sense to distrust the mercenary and distasteful alliance between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. We protect the repressive kingdom that spawned Osama bin Laden, and most of the 9/11 hijackers, in exchange for the Saudis keeping our fecklessly oil-addicted country lubricated.

Yes, it has stuck deep in the craw of many of us Americans that after 9/11, Washington squandered global goodwill and a huge percentage of our resources invading a country that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, while continuing to pander to this dysfunctional dynasty. After all, Saudi Arabia is believed to have paid Bin Laden's murderous gang millions in protection money in the years before 9/11, and it lavishly funds extremist religious schools throughout the region that preach and teach anti-Western jihad.

"Al Qaeda found fertile fundraising ground in the kingdom," noted the 9/11 commission report in one of its many careful understatements. The fact is, without Saudi Arabia, there would be no Al Qaeda today.

Our president loves to use the word "evil" in his speeches, yet throughout his life he and his family have had deep personal, political and financial ties with a country that represents everything the American Revolution stood against: tyranny, religious intolerance, corrupt royalty and popular ignorance. This is a country where women aren't allowed to drive and those who show "too much skin" can be beaten in the street by officially sanctioned mobs of fanatics. A medieval land where newspapers routinely publish the most outlandish anti-Semitic rants. A place where executions are held in public, torture is the norm in prison and the most extreme and expansionist version of Islam is the state religion.

It's hard to see how Saddam Hussein's brutal and secular Iraq was worse than the brutal theocracy run by the House of Saud. Yet one nation we raze and the other we fete. Is it any wonder that much of the world sees the United States as the planet's biggest hypocrite?

As insider books by former White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke, journalist Bob Woodward and others have recounted, punishing Saudi Arabia in any way for its long ideological and financial support of terrorism was not even on the table in the days after 9/11. Instead, within hours of the planes hitting the towers, the powerful neoconservatives in the White House rushed to use the tragedy as an excuse for a long-dreamed invasion of Iraq.

Meanwhile, after two wars to make the Middle East safe for the Saudis, wars that cost hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and thousands of American lives, the price of oil is soaring - up 42% from just a year ago. Good thing we just passed a pork-laden energy bill that will do little to nothing to ease our crushing - and rising - dependence on imported oil. Federal officials project that by 2025, the U.S. will have to import 68% of its oil to meet demand, up from 58% today.

There are those who argue that the best rationale for invading Iraq was to ease our dependence on Saudi Arabia's massive oil fields, which might allow for a more rational or moral relationship. Yet the dark irony is that with Iraq in chaos and its oil flow limited by insurgent attacks and a bungled reconstruction, Saudi Arabia is now more important to the United States than ever.

It's scary, but these gaping contradictions don't seem to trouble our president a whit.

I couldn't believe the words that appeared on my screen in an e-mail:

Overthrow
all the governments
all at once

International criminal syndicate has taken control of world's money; honest citizens must prevent them from destroying the world; Lennon was right: all borders are bogus. Is there any reason we can't have an honest world?

What a radical idea! Isn't that what decent people want? But is that the world we have? We have massive numbers of dead people turning up in strange and suspicious mortality categories. Shall I tell you Americans some of the causes of death inflicted by your sons and daughters on innocent children in Iraq, or will you turn your face away and return silently to your polite political dogma and the cringing ugliness of your own suppressed private nightmares? Hmm?

We haven't had enough radicals. America was founded by radicals (though some were surreptitious scoundrels, too). Jefferson, even Adams, Madison and Franklin were radicals, and we Americans would definitely not have the good deal we have without the intrepid efforts of these intelligent men.

Franklin, you remember Franklin, the guy with the kite. "A republic," he said, "if you can keep it." And Jefferson, perhaps you recall, said:

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established, should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience [has] shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce [the people] under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."

In our lifetimes and in fact ever since World War I, we've seen precious few hints of radicalism: left wing radicals like Abbie Hoffman in the '60s challenged perceptions and changed them enough to stop a war; right wing radical Gordon Kahl had his hands cut off by federal agents; way out radicals like David Koresh got to watch his babies burn because he said the new messiah was from Iran; and, of course, Eugene Debs was the most successful socialist radical in American history; he got 6 percent of the vote in a presidential election (1912) and actually raised the hourly pay rate for many Americans before he wound up in jail.

Do you ever wonder who exactly it was who brought the hammer down on these radicals? Or why what they said elicited such disproportionate punishment?

Today I guess you could say radicals include Kathy Kelly, the Voices for Peace lady doing time for insisting on assisting victims of America's Iraq genocide, and some of the honorable soldiers like Kevin Benderman who chose jail over crimes against humanity. Also are the Roman Catholic nuns who doing three-year vacations in a Colorado prison.

But the most tragic radicals were all the black people who have been crushed in the dust over two centuries of our bloodthirsty European Protestant genocidal history. Quit blaming Jews and Catholics. Take a long look at the White Anglo Saxon Protestants who pay attention to their church once a week, smile at their neighbors, and then build a gigantic empire on the unpaid backs of black cottonpickers. Of course this came after those refined White Europeans utilized every method possible to exterminate the hapless red man first, and later got rich selling drugs to the Chinese.

In my lifetime, a young articulate black man named Fred Hampton sticks in my mind. A charismatic and sincere community organizer as a teen, Fred was gunned down in a fusillade of bullets from murderous COINTELPRO cops - while lying in bed with no weapon. Of course in the newspapers the next day we learned our brave cops removed a dangerous radical from our streets. Another martyr to bogus American justice is Native American inspiration Leonard Peltier, jailed in Leavenworth for more than 30 years now for a crime he didn't commit.

Given the brief glimpse of the abbreviated political trajectory of Fred Hampton I have to think he would have made a wonderful president someday. Same could be said of Leonard. These remarks make America's nasty white supremacists squirm. Good.

For all you effete intellectual snobs (Spiro Agnew's famous phrase), the radical to beat all was the cantankerous French Situationist Guy Debord, who argued that we were trapped in our own abstractions and had lost all meaningful contact with the world around us, before one sad day he put a bullet in his own head because no one could hear what he was saying.

"Imagine there's no countries," John Lennon sang shortly before he was taken out by a Bush family religious program mind-trained assassin with six shots to the back of the head, mmm yes, Mossad style. Can you say Hinckley Dinckley? Oh no, that was Chapman. Same school, though. Did I ever tell you about the time Hinckley's brother had dinner with Bush? Another time, perhaps ...

"All you need is love," Lennon prominently sang. Now how can you argue with that, even as you contemplate that a lot of this good will was generated as a social experiment by (even then) Zionized social scientists in a place called the Tavistock Institute in London, where a bomb went off the other day, incidentally. Isn't that interesting? ,P> What has always interested me about the 9/11 skeptics movement is the almost complete absence of political dogma among its participants. I mean, there are people from all over the political spectrum: the Trap Rock Peace Center to the American Patriot Friends Network. That's good market coverage, my friend.

But in the exact middle of the American heart in this incredible poison: a totally locked down establishment media monster regurgitating the twisted and clumsy lies of sociopathic misanthropes who are butchering and poisoning half the world while hiding behind flags and bibles. No. I take that back. They've already destroyed both of them, too.

Yes, our president, the one who OKs overnight visits from a well-known homosexual prostitute and then puts him in the press corps to throw gopher ball questions at him, yes, that president, says he gets his orders from God!

This is the best news I've heard about religion in years. It tells you all exactly what religion is. Remember: the best Bible passage is Deuteronomy 28:56-58. Look it up. It says everything.

Thanks to George Bush and Tom Brokaw. And Charles F****** Krauthammer (the perfect Jewish name). American politics has evolved to Howdy Doody meets Bride of Chucky, and the most astounding thing is - obviously we can't seem to figure it out - is that the American people have ACCEPTED IT!!!

They've accepted the destruction of the Constitution, the routine use of torture, the total falsification of elections, and the needless mass murders of hundreds of thousands of South Asians in the past two years alone.

So needless to say, I've looked for signs of hope that there were still actual human beings on this planet, and certainly have found that and more in both the 9/11 skeptics movement, and especially in the wonderful people I've met on the Internet, many of whom are much smarter than me and just as concerned about the apparently imminent destruction of most of the things we hold dear.

But the most amazing thing I have found is that virtually all of the people rising up and being willing to consider the frightening reality that 9/11 was an operation executed by our government ...

... wanna buy an Arab terrorist? They're for sale, you know, and the CIA uses a lot of them; you occasionally see their case files on TV for a few weeks; then a new one is chosen as this week's excuse for continuing the carnage by our multi-trillion dollar war machine ....

... the most amazing thing is that all these people, upset about government lies and needless killing, ARE FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM. Most are not really political at all.

And their issues are not about godless communists or soulless capitalists. Their issues are not about foreign intrigues or Washington sexcapades. Their issue is about living a good life and not having their money stolen by criminal demagogues posing as sanctimonious philosophers.

Their issue is honesty.

The middle of the American political spectrum, totally ignored by the corporate spin machine under the assumption that "to go along to get along" is the political philosophy of choice for most of its listeners, is becoming radicalized over the issue of honesty. Under the media's very noses. That's delicious.

Look under that rock in the middle of the road. Why it's Bill Moyers, sonafagun, and he's saying the president should be in jail. Naw, I must not have heard that right.

Mothers with sons dead in Iraq are at the center of this community cyclone. They are surrounded by many millions of thoughtful Americans who question why President Bush didn't permit a thoroughly and openly professional investigation - just what they'd do for any routine airplane crash in which people were killed - on September 11, 2001.

Who question why the evidence was carted away unexamined, and why New York firemen were told to clam up, or they would lose their jobs.

Who question why the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to have been planned BEFORE 9/11 - yet later explained away as being conducted BECAUSE of 9/11.

Who question why their sons and daughters conducted the most horribly demented sexual experiments on their Iraqi prisoners, including little boys, some of whom were raped and killed. Did you see where Donald Rumsfeld testified before Congress that the new pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, where U.S. troops torture Iraqi captives with electrical wires in their anuses, were simply too terrible to look at, and we should just forget the whole thing?

Who question why Donald Rumsfeld created his own terror squads to go into Iraq and foment violence, in order, he said, to identify who the REAL TERRORISTS really are. The imbedded press, of course, forgot to keep of track of what they were doing. How many American adolescents have been killed by Rumsfeld's special fomenting squads, trying to draw those rascally terrorists out of their hideouts? That's exactly how the Fallujah massacre began.

Who question why Fallujah, the most hellacious and despicable war crime of the new century, was allowed to happen, and then the American people were prevented from seeing it or from hearing about it. We got to see Michael Jackson instead.

The people asking the right questions are ordinary people, with no particular political persuasion except live and let live.

I've been waiting for a long time for someone to come along and produce what I call (and the phrase is an important one to remember, in this age of spin) a COHERENT MEME about 9/11, which is the key to really understanding America's role in the devolution of society and its plundering of the planet.

A coherent meme.

And wouldn't you know, two average citizens - one a retired Bush administration official, for God's sake; and the other, a shy professor of theology at an obscure West Coast college - were, amid the American public's terrified silence during 2002 and the following years, able to logically and dispassionately ferret out the significant facts from among the panicky shrieks and emotional invective of the first wave of 9/11 skeptics, and state clearly and unambiguously to the general public that - well, I hope this isn't the first time you've heard this, because it surely will not be the last - 9/11 was an inside job.

Same story with 7/7 and all those terror bombings in between.

What is the coherent meme in all this, you ask?

Well, let's listen to what these two unprepossessing men, both accomplished professionals recognized in their fields with what you might say are national reputations, or at least as respectable high-achievers in their jobs, actually had to say.

They are Morgan Reynolds and David Ray Griffin.

Reynolds is so Republican he was chief economist in the Bush the Lamer's first term. But we should never make the mistake of thinking everybody in the government is a money grubbing perv - even though the topmost leaders all may be that, and worse. Listen to Reynolds ....

It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause(s) of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7. If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis will not likely prove to be sound. Revised engineering and construction practices, for example, based on the belief that the twin towers collapsed through airplane damage and subsequent fires is premature, to say the least.

More importantly, momentous political and social consequences would follow if impartial observers concluded that professionals imploded the WTC. If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an "inside job" and a government attack on America would be compelling. Meanwhile, the job of scientists, engineers and impartial researchers everywhere is to get the scientific and engineering analysis of 9/11 right, "though heaven should fall." Unfortunately, getting it right in today's "security state" demands daring because explosives and structural experts have been intimidated in their analyses of the collapses of 9/11.

If you're really interested in what really happened on 9/11/2001, you should savor Reynolds' entire latest take on the subject at... So what is the coherent meme that ordinary people can whisper to their neighbors that was stated unequivocally by this retired professor from Texas A&M? This radical! ,P> Erroneous engineering analysis. Experts intimidated. Planes and fires couldn't have knocked down the towers. Likely conclusion? Inside job.

Maybe the paranoid and corrupt U.S. government should begin targeting respectable white-haired college professors instead of innocent Muslim men, because Griffin, another retired professor (from Claremont School of Theology) has done more damage to the criminal syndicate in Washington than any Islamic enthusiast could ever hope to do.

Griffin's book ....

The New Pearl Harbor reported evidence that at least six of the alleged hijackers are still alive. David Harrison of the Telegraph interviewed two of the men who supposedly died on Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, one of whom said that he "had never even heard of Pennsylvania," let alone died there. The Associated Press reported that Waleed al-Shehri, supposedly on Flight 11, contacted the U.S. embassy in Morocco about two weeks after 9/11. The 9/11 Commission Report, nevertheless, suggested that al-Shehri was responsible for stabbing one of the flight attendants shortly before Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower.

The New Pearl Harbor cited reports that although Mohamed Atta, the supposed ringleader, had been portrayed as a devout Muslim ready to meet his maker, he actually loved alcohol, pork, and lap dances. Zelikow's commission, however, said that Atta had become "fanatically" religious. They also claimed that they could find no credible explanation as to why Atta and the other hijackers went to Las Vegas. The mainstream press has let the Commission get away with these obvious contradictions ....

Another big question created by the official story is how the hijackers, by crashing planes into the Twin Towers, caused them and Building 7 to collapse. One problem is that Building 7 was not struck by an airplane, and steel-frame buildings had never before been caused to collapse by fire alone, even when the fires had been much bigger, hotter, and longer-lasting. The Commission avoided this problem by simply not mentioning this fact or even, incredibly, that Building 7 collapsed.

The 9/11 Commission Report failed to mention that WTC7 collapsed. Hmm.

Another problem, which I mentioned earlier, is that the collapses had all the standard features of controlled demolitions. For example, all three buildings came down at virtually free-fall speed. The Commission even alluded to this feature, saying that the "South Tower collapsed in 10 seconds." But it never explained how fire plus the impact of an airplane could have produced such a collapse.

Controlled demolition was also suggested by the fact that the collapses were total, with the 110-story Twin Towers collapsing into a pile of rubble only a few stories high. The core of each tower had consisted of 47 massive steel columns, which extended from the basements through the roofs. Even if we ignore all the other problems in the official "pancake" theory of the collapses, those massive steel columns should have still been sticking up a thousand feet in the air. Zelikow's commission handled this problem with the audacious claim that "[t]he interior core of the buildings was a hollow steel shaft."

The Commission said the WTC cores were hollow. Hmm.

Another example: Breaking those massive steel columns would have required very powerful explosives. Many survivors of the towers have reported hearing and feeling explosions. But the 9/11 Commission failed to mention any of these reports. William Rodriguez told the 9/11 Commission behind closed doors about feeling and hearing a huge explosion in the sub-basement of the North Tower, then rescuing people from its effects, but neither his name nor any of his testimony is found in Zelikow's final report

In any case, as these illustrations show, the 9/11 Commission, which had the opportunity to rebut the prima facie case against the Bush administration, failed to do so. This means that the publication of The 9/11 Commission Report needs to be recognized as a decisive event, because it was the moment at which the prima facie case against the Bush administration became a conclusive case.

What we need now is a press that will let the American people in on this development---which is most important, given the fact that the official story about 9/11 has provided the pretext for virtually every other horrible thing this administration has done.

Do I hear a coherent meme?

The government and corporate media are covering up the truth. The so-called hijackers remain unidentified and unconfirmed. The Commission didn't conduct a real investigation. Why do you think that was?

Hmm. Reynolds and Griffin. Old guys. Members of the establishment.

These guys are radicals, and you know why? They're trying to tell you the truth, and most of you refuse to hear it. You're so enamored of your so-called security, and so terrified of losing your meager income, that you will permit all manner of depravity and false witness. You will go to sleep at night counting your money, but you won't count the innocent dead bodies who have been murdered in your name. That's about the size of it.

Except for one more quintessential, sterling example of radical. Of people we should emulate.

Cindy Sheehan. Whose son Casey died in Iraq. Who has been at the forefront of trying to alert the American people that her son died for a lie, for a whole series of lies, and people are still dying for these lies.

Once she was just an ordinary mom. Then Bush's lies took her son away, along with the lives of some 10,000 Americans and 140,000 Iraqi women and children in only two years. Plus ruining countless other lives. That's Dubya's legacy, along with a host of other barbaric and inhumane deeds, including the theft of trillions of dollars stolen from you and me and funneled to his corrupt corporate cronies. (It really is an effective formula for radicalizing the middle class.)

At this moment as I write, Cindy Sheehan is standing by the side of the road in Crawford, Texas, demanding to speak to President Bush. I just saw her on CNN, interviewed by Wolf Blitzer, CNN's Israeli anchorman.

She told Blitzer about the first meeting she had with Bush, when the jovial president came into the room telling jokes and then consoling Cindy for the loss of "her loved one."

"He didn't even know my son's name," Cindy told the squirming Blitzer. "And I'm here until he comes out and talks to me." Sheehan told CNN that Bush's "misguided policy" is going to cost a lot more mothers their sons unless the war is stopped now.

The call has gone out around the world for ordinary people, musicians, and the news media to converge on Crawford to hear Cindy's story and witness Bush's response. For more information check out and check the other stories on that delightful site while you're there. ,P> So ... now you know that Homeland Security should be concentrating on suppressing American mothers who have lost their sons to lies in Iraq.

White-haired college professors and ordinary middle-class mothers .... these are the new radicals. Will Bush and his criminal sycophants come up with a new policy to make corporate America safe from them, because they are the real threat to the people in power?

Ah, the new America. Imprisoned minds exploited by unscrupulous killers. But the middle class radicals are emerging. And their single overriding issue is honesty.

So I looked at that bizarre e-mail again ...

Overthrow
all the governments
all at once

International criminal syndicate has taken control of world's money; honest citizens must prevent them from destroying the world; Lennon was right: all borders are bogus. Is there any reason we can't have an honest world?

... and suddenly it didn't seem so radical to me anymore.

Oh, I know, it's presumptuous of me to speak for people in other nations of the world, yammering Yankee dog that I am. And for sure Americans seem to be unable to clean up their own act, their unstoppable murder machine sweeping around the world.

But Bush, repulsive and without redeeming social value as he is, is still only a symptom. The real disease is systemic.

And until that truth is addressed, Cindy will be left crying on the side of the road, principled white-haired grandfathers and grandmothers will become the new targets of persecution, and young boys and girls will keep dying needlessly.

Unless, of course, we take the advice of that strange e-mail, and stop this self-destructive foolishness right now.

Any chance you can honestly respond, or are you too scared? Remember the coherent memes. It's up to you now.

I get this a lot: Hey Mark, you nefarious and perverted liberal commie tofu-hugging sex-drunk San Francisco medical experiment gone wrong from the land of fruits and nuts (or some iteration thereof -- so cute, my hate mail can be), hey, I notice you love to ridicule those creepy Christian megachurches and you enjoy spanking wide-eyed Mormons and tweaking the litigious nipples of the cult of Scientology and you recoil from toxic Bush policy like a vegetarian recoils from undercooked veal...

And I can tell you think Dick Cheney is pretty much the devil in a defibrillator and that America is so desperately on the wrong track it might as well be North Korea, and you clearly tend to wince in savage karmic pain when looking down the rusty barrel of a welfare-happy red state and I just have one slightly nasty and pointed and cliched question for you

Here it is: Where is your supposed progressive openness? Your liberal generosity of spirit? I thought you Lefties were all mushy and passive and live-and-let-live?

In other words, where is that famous so-called tolerance I thought all you libs were supposed to possess like some sort of gentle polyamorous smiling hug for the world?

To which I reply: You cannot be serious. Does the answer really need to be articulated? Is it not painfully obvious? Can I have a shot of Patrón and a long nap before I answer? Here goes ...

You, hate-mailers from the sanctimonious Right and even some of you morally paralyzed middle-grounders from the Left, are correct. I am, in fact, deeply intolerant. It is true. I can hide my deep biases and predispositions no longer.

I cannot, for example, tolerate the dark and violent road down which this nation seems intent on careening like an Escalade on meth. I cannot tolerate brutal never-ending unnecessary wars and I cannot allow gay rights to be bashed and I truly loathe watching women's rights be slammed back to 1952. Or 1852.

I really have little patience for the gutting of our school system and the decimation of science and mysticism and the human mind for the sake of a handful of militant Christian zealots who truly believe the Second Coming will be arriving really soon but hopefully not before the next episode of HBO's "Cathouse: The Series," which they watch in secret with the lights off while clutching a Bible in one hand and a big tub of Country Crock margarine in the other.

I cannot tolerate an American president, ostensibly meant to be one of the most articulate and intellectually sophisticated leaders on the planet, mumbling his semicoherent support of the embarrassing nontheory of "Intelligent Design," to the detriment of about 300 years of confirmed science and 10 million years of common sense to the point where America's armies of dumbed-down Ritalin-drunk children look at him and sigh and secretly wish they could have a future devoid of such imbecilic thought but who realize, deep down, they are merely another doomed and fraught generation who will face an increasingly steep uphill battle, who will actually have to fight for fact and intellectual growth and spiritual progress against a rising tide of ignorance and religious hegemony and sanitized revisionist textbooks that insult their understanding and sucker punch their sexuality and bleed their minds dry.

I have surpassed my allowable limit for how much environmental devastation I can willingly swallow or how many billion-dollar tax subsidies our cowardly CEO president gives his cronies in Big Energy while doing nothing to ease our gluttony for foreign oil, all the while trying to tell us how many undereducated misguided American teenage soldiers we have to sacrifice at the bloody altar of oil and empire before we can call ourselves king of the bone pile again.

But I am perhaps most intolerant, not of Christians per se, not of faith, certainly not of radiant self-defined spirituality, not even of organized religion, though I do fully believe more independent spirits and raw human souls and moist sexual licks have been lost to its often narrow-minded and cosmically rigid brainwashing techniques than have ever been saved. But hey, that's just me.

I am most intolerant of, well, of those who allow such intolerance. Of those who would, based on their narrow views of sex, God, love, hope, war, the mind, the Earth, soil and animals and air and water and fire and love and spirit and drugs and guns and dildos, work to legislate those neoconservative beliefs, codify them, make them the law of the land, force their regressive beliefs on everyone else under punishment of violence and beatings and prison. I am, in short, intolerant of intolerance.

Oh, let us be clear. I love diversity, religious pluralism, peace and love and pacifism and good drugs and open-mouthed sensuality, happy to let you believe in any god you like and marry any gender you like and let you love how you will and be in full control of your sex and your body and your mind.

This, to me, is the America worth fighting for. These are the laws I support. Don't believe in abortion? Don't understand gay people? Sexuality make you rashy? Think Harry Potter teaches kids evil and witchcraft? Don't marry a sexy gay witch abortionist. But don't you dare, based on your limited understanding of God and life, make laws declaring that I can't.

But maybe this is the problem, especially here in San Francisco, the World Headquarters of Tolerance, where liberals tend to be so PC and open-minded they merely sigh and shrug when our government and half of the nation move to outlaw everything they stand for, when they openly loathe human rights and try to codify homophobia in the U.S. Constitution and slowly annihilate Roe v. Wade and treat any display of resistance or questioning of the norm the way a dog treats a fire hydrant.

Enough. Basta. Let's refashion the old, stagnant definition of tolerance and make it less about merely enduring, merely putting up with the existence of other narrow-minded beliefs no matter how devastating and embarrassing they obviously are to the nation's health.

Rather, let's flip that sucker over and baste it with raw goat butter and sear it on the open flames of divine justice and bliss and intellectual fire and white-hot orgasm and burn it new.

Let us take the rather flaccid word tolerance and pump it full of Ecstasy and medical marijuana and sake and real divine love and fancy book learnin', turn it on its head and spin it like a bottle and reclaim it from the neocon Right and turn it into, say, giddy outrage. Or radical reconsideration. Or ecstatic rebellion. Or wet conscious electric pointed awareness. Is this not a better way?

The incomparable Raw Story website is publishing a letter it acquired on Tuesday, Aug 9, from 16 Democratic Representatives (whose number has now burgeoned to 38) urging George Bush to meet with Cindy Sheehan, whose son, Casey, was slain in Iraq in 2002. Sheehan has been camped on Bush's doorstep since Saturday when she and a small group of supporters were forced to walk in a ditch struggling through knee-deep weeds as they made their way to Prairie Chapel, the Bush "ranch," a former pig farm in Crawford, Texas.

According to The Iconoclast, Bush's hometown paper, Sheehan said she decided to go to Crawford because of comments Bush made which coincided with the deaths of 12 Marine reservists from Ohio who were killed in perhaps the deadliest roadside bombing of U.S. troops in Iraq. Sheehan was outraged at Bush's remarks to about 1,800 members of the American Legislative Exchange Council in Grapevine on Aug 3 that the men and women who've lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan died in a noble and selfless cause.

"We all know by now that that's not true, and I want to ask George Bush, 'Why did my son die? What was the noble cause that he died for?'" said Sheehan. "I don't want [President Bush] to use my son's name or my family name to justify any more killing or to exploit my son's name, my son's sacrifice, or my son's honor to justify more killing. As a mother, why would I want one more mother to go through what I'm going through, Iraqi or American?

"And I want to tell him that the only way to honor my son's sacrifice is to bring the troops home now."

There are few things more relentless this side of Hell than an August Texas sun. Unless it would be the lost souls of Fallujah crying out for justice through the Napalm flames. Or perhaps it is a mother so engulfed in grief at the cruel and needless loss of her child that her primal screams reverberate throughout the world. Except at the pig farm. Or within the entire US Senate. Or on the deaf ears of all but 38 of the 435 representatives in the US House.

The initial 16 -- one representative for each word Bush used to lie us onto the New World Order killing fields -- are John Conyers, George Miller, Maxine Waters, Corrine Brown, Dennis Kucinich, Carolyn Maloney, Jim McDermott, Jim McGovern, Barbara Lee, Zoe Lofgren, Peter Oberstar, John Lewis, Bernie Sanders, Bob Filner, Micheal Honda, and Raul Grijalva. I have searched in vain for Nancy Pelosi, Cynthia McKinney, Charlie Rangel -- searched for just one Republican who would ask Bush to meet with the mother of a slain soldier...

Six soldiers and marines were killed today. Four yesterday. In just 10 days of August, 44 Americans and many, many more innocent Iraqis have been murdered. We don't "do" body counts of Iraqi citizens, so there's no way of knowing how many have died, but we do know that more than four soldiers and marines have been slaughtered in a single day -- every day. The pig farm president may not know where his children are tonight, but Casey Sheehan knows where his mother is -- sweltering in 100-plus-degree weather on a desolate prairie -- ignored by the commander-in-chief -- but still out there, bravely supporting the troops.

There are many mothers whose anguish matches Sheehan's, not only those who have lost children, but those whose children are returning broken and maimed; doomed to lives of desperation and pain. Mothers like Sandy Briggs, from Keokuk, Iowa, whose son, Sgt. Robert Briggs, a soldier in the 224th Engineer Battalion, was hit by shrapnel from an artillery round April 16 at Iraq's Camp Ramadi.

According to the Burlington, Iowa, newspaper, The Hawkeye, "Surgeons took one of his eyes. The other is partially blind. Head trauma paralyzed his left side. Metal litters his body...An operation removed part of his skull. Now he wears a helmet to get out of bed."

Bush says he "grieves 'n mourns" for the dead and maimed. His "thoughts 'n prayers" go out to them. He 'preciates them making the ultimate sacrifice for his noble cause. Many, however, are beginning to think Bush has a strange way of showing his compassion. He has not attended a single funeral of the now 1,848 Americans who have died in Iraq because of his lies and lack of planning, and he continues to stubbornly "ditch" Sheehan as she keeps a lonely vigil on the Texas plains.

Bush might wish later that he had come out to meet with Sheehan upon her arrival Saturday when there was but a handful of supporters accompanying her. If the media covered the meeting at all, he would have been portrayed as a caring president, and by Sunday it would all have been over. But that isn't how Bush operates. He does not negotiate; remember, his will is strong, his resolve will not be broken. Bush is not satisfied until everything he touches turns into a steaming, odious pile of bullshit. He made the cowardly choice to send out a couple of minions -- national security adviser Steve Hadley and deputy White House chief of staff Joe Hagin -- to tell her that Bush really really cares, but nobody's coming home until "the mission is accomplished..."

So -- as Bush likes to say, "history will show" the Revolution started on a steamy August day...at the pig farm.

Who knew? Who would have believed just a week ago that, after all our years of hard work, the crude and pitiless Bush would run out there, ram his middle finger in the face of a heartbroken mother, and jump-start the Revolution?

By the time Cindy Sheehan leaves her station at the pig farm, Bush will know that he was wrong. He will know, because "Mother" is not just half a word, as Bush and his Texas buddies, his Skull and Bones cohorts, his PNAC perps were raised to believe. "Mother" is Nature. "Mother" is Earth. "Mother" is an invincible, protective force that, if awakened and sufficiently outraged, will sweep the entire murderous bunch from their seats of evil power. Ultimately, "Mother" will bring our troops home.

The mainstsream media will find, much to their chagrin, that the Revolution is NOW, and will continue apace without them. The Iconoclast is offering hourly updates on the Sheehan vigil. Friends of Peace and Justice of Waco is mobilizing support for Sheehan's vigil, which could last until the end of August.

More information can be obtained at the Crawford Peace House website or by calling (254)486-0099. Air America Radio hosts, especially Randi Rhodes and Mike Malloy, are all over this story, giving minute-by-minute updates, many of them coming from Sheehan herself, who calls the station regularly. Google "Cindy Sheehan," and you will discover the entire Internet is wide awake and on the march, and will join the Revolution -- at the pig farm.

Also check out --

Gold Star Families for Peace; www.gsfp.org

Military Families Speak Out; www.mfso.org

Veterans for Peace; www.veteransforpeace.org

CodePink; www.codepink4peace.org

Vietnam Veterans Against War; www.vvaw.org

Iraq Veterans Against the War; www.ivaw.net