Editor’s note: This is a partial transcript of a talk in Seattle John Judge gave in 2005. John was the co-founder of 911 Citizens Watch, a grassroots watchdog group demanding transparency and a thorough investigation by the National Commission on Terrorist Acts Upon the United States. John also co-founded the Committee for an Open Archives, the Coalition on Political Assassinations, and the Committee for High School Options and Information on Careers, Education and Self-Improvement (CHOICES), a group countering military recruitment in the schools and providing civilian alternatives. He died in 2014 due to complications from a stroke. His final project, established as a 501(c)(3) in 2012, was the Museum of Hidden History, established as a 501(c)(3) non-profit. With John’ s passing, work involving the Museum has shifted to developing The Hidden History Center, now housed in York, PA. The vast and incisive legacy of his research and voice provides an inspiring beacon to engage all one’s wits and creative imagination to help the human project change course and chart a different future than the current dead-end one based on the demands of capital and its accumulation. Exercising our intelligence in this manner, with clarity and coherence, is of the highest calling Life presents us with. In the near term the entire 2+ hour presentation will be produced, complete with annotations. The transcript has been edited for readability.

[0:46:18]
But what I’m trying to point out here is somebody was pointing a finger. Now it’s an interesting finger because a lot of these guys were Saudis that they named as suspects. A lot of them came through Saudi Arabia. But we went to war with Afghanistan. We ignored Pakistan. Pakistan was the conduit for the funding.

There were two major covert operations in the 80s and 90s. The first one started with Carter and Brzezinski. Brzezinski got the bright idea that if they destabilized the situation a little bit in Afghanistan maybe they could draw the Soviet Union into a response and then they would be in a quagmire if we armed the opposition, like Vietnam, and it would break the back of the Soviet Union. He was interviewed more recently and he said he has no regrets about doing that and he said why would a few hopped-up muslims be worse, or bother me, when we’ve got the fall of the Soviet Union? How would you put one up against the other? [“The CIA’s Intervention in Afghanistan,” Interview with Z.B. Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15 Jan 1998. The quoted statement was: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”.]

So he came up with that idea. He went over there. They started initial funding under discretionary funds. Then they got a little more serious about it. And then the Reagan and Bush years came in and a guy named William Casey took over the CIA and he started these off-the-shelf covert operations, not telling Congress and hiding them. The funding of the Afghanistan response with what they call the Mujahideen and this counter Soviet effort, some of it fairly reactionary in my view, because Bush likes to go in and say he’s freed the Afghan women. But the Afghan women had a fairly open relation in the society prior to the time that the U.S. financed the coup against the socialist regime there.

It’s like we’re freeing them from the trouble we caused them. It’s like they love to say, Well isn’t the world better off without Saddam Hussein? I said, Yes and it would have been even better off if you hadn’t handed him the names of four hundred progressive people to kill in Iraq so that the Baath Party could come into power and you hadn’t armed him and financed him and kept him in power in order to fight with Iran and you hadn’t given him chemical and biological weapons and a green light to go into Kuwait when Kuwait was stealing his oil. I mean, the world could be a lot better but when you put in eighty five dictators and you take out one, I’m not cheering yet.

So they saw this opportunity and Casey jumped on it and it had two primary funding sources for the rise of the Afghan resistance. One was American CIA through Pakistani Intelligence and also laundering money that came from Afghanistan being about 85% of the world opium production at that point. Drug money has often financed covert operations. It’s a long-standing thing that goes all the way back into the 1940s. It’s a good source and it’s worth more than gold.

Guns and drugs are pretty much the real currency of the world. Oliver North called it a clever idea when he got into it a little later. The drug profits can do it and it’s also one of the reasons, I think, they won’t let us see the CIA budget. Because the actual budget won’t pay for the operations and then they’d have to explain how it is they’re financing what they do.

But they were using that and Pakistan’s ISI military intelligence was the conduit of the funds into people like bin Laden and his mentor at that time Mr. Hekmatyar who was one of the major drug dealers in the area and they got that money and they were meeting. Bin Laden comes out of a very rich Saudi construction family that did contracts for the DoD and the CIA. They built those caves that he was supposedly later hiding in or operating out of as part of the Afghan resistance. That was Bin Laden Construction. They have international ties, financial ties with the Bush family and the Carlyle Group and James Bath. There’s a whole interconnection of these people.

It’s like the night of the shooting of Ronald Reagan in March of ’81 when the Washington Post said isn’t it ironic that Neil Bush was scheduled to have dinner with Scott Hinkley and they canceled their dinner plans tonight? It was ironic. I said, Well if I told you that Robert Oswald, Lee’s older brother, was going to have dinner with one of LBJ’s daughters on November 22, 1963 would you think that’s ironic? If so, I’m an irony theorist.

But the Bush-Bin Laden connection is a little too close to ignore to me. And also then you have the CIA funding of bin Laden and these terrorist cells that now of course somehow threaten us more than a whole continent used to that was nuclear armed. And we have to have a bigger military and a bigger CIA and a bigger DIA in order to deal with them.

Far be it for me to say it’s perhaps a boogeyman. I remember when Oliver North put a security fence around his house because he was afraid of another terrorist back in that era, Abu Nidal. And I said maybe we should change his name to Abu Giman. And then it, of course, came out that the company that North was operating through was arming Abu Nidal. But, you know, it’s just a coincidence! It’s just the way the world works. Friends fall apart I guess and they shake hands one day with Saddam Hussein and then they whap him on the head the next.

It doesn’t give me a lot of a lot of warm feeling to know when these things happen that they really aren’t being done in my interest of your interest. So we get this situation with a false lead and we don’t yet know who the suspects are but we’re told who we can blame.

Then Colin Powell said he was going to give us a white paper—do you remember this?—and put the evidence out. Then he said a week later he misspoke and he wasn’t going to give us anything. Then they took it to the Brits and the Brits said, Well it’s not enough to go to court but it’s enough to go to war.

So in they went to the war that they had already planned against the Taliban not because of bin Laden’s attack—if in fact he’s the author of it—but because the Taliban balked at the low price they were offered by Unocal to take a pipeline down from the Caspian Sea to the water and they got in the way. [John Maresca,] The head of International Relations Unocal went to Congress and said, These people are standing in the way. That’s our oil under their sand. So what are they doing? They’re getting in the way and we have to get rid of them.

Then Colin Powell went in July to all the surrounding countries and said, We’re going to invade Afghanistan in mid-October and we’re going to take out the Taliban. Well since he told Pakistan and some other places maybe the Taliban got word of it. But I incensed a right-winger who was supporting pre-emptive strike ideas from the Bush administration by saying that maybe 9/11 was their pre-emptive strike. After all they had more evidence that we’d attack them after those cruise missiles than that Afghanistan had ever attacked us. But he said, That was crazy and I said, No it’s just your logic; turned around on you and you don’t like.

The reality is all that was in place. All the planning about what they were going to do in Iraq was in place and they were also waiting. I did a talk in Los Angeles in 1996 called “Are You Scared Yet?” And the subtitle was, “Phony Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and the Strategy Of Tension.”

Strategy Of Tension is a term in Europe that’s used because the intelligence agencies would go and provoke a terrorist attack. They would often use the right-wing first. Have the right-wing blow up a train, for instance, killing a lot of people. Then they would leave clues that it was the left-wing. Then they would crack down on the left-wing. And then when they were done repressing the left-wing they’d say, Oh, these weren’t the right clues. This was the right-wing. And then they’d go and crack down on the right wing as well. It’s classic agente provocateur, but they were building it up as a whole state system, strategy of tension, that you create terrorist incidents.

So I started looking at both the assassination attempts and other so-called terrorist incidents here in the United States. What I was saying in the talk is it looks to me from all the internal RAND Corporation studies that were going on for the Pentagon [e.g., Countering the New Terrorism, 1999], all they were talking about was, The Soviet Union’s going to go away as a threat. We need a new threat. Counter-terrorism is going to be it. We’re going to build up this whole counter-terrorism thing.

By the mid-to-late nineties they were already in place. They already had FBI counter-terrorism units. They had Joint Task Forces with all the agencies on them. They had people focused on domestic terrorism. They were making up new rules and new laws. Clinton signed in this draconian legislation after the attack on the [Alfred P.] Murrah [Federal] Building. This was their whole theme.

They also said, It’ll go from conventional weapons and explosives, to chemical, to biological, and then they’ll go to nuclear. And as it went up those what would our response be? And all the charts are, We’ll start to implement complete martial law in the United States and we’ll go to Continuity of Government.

Continuity of Government was announced on September 11th in DC. It was announced and I haven’t heard it subsequently unannounced. And a month later there was a headline in the Washington Post—I started to think, Gee maybe I could get a job writing for them—big block letters, “Shadow Government Operating In Secret.” It’s a headline in the Washington Post. It said that Cheney was down in a bunker in an undisclosed location—that means Bluemont, Virginia, in the little Pentagon that they had to refurbish and everything, and they have one up in Pennsylvania too. And now I think they’re building one in his backyard because there’ve been all these explosions and the neighbors are complaining and the Navy won’t say it is. He doesn’t want to travel down there, he’d just go in the backyard. They had a picture of Condoleezza Rice and Bush and the rest of them out of Camp David with this huge screen with Cheney’s face on it talking to them from the undisclosed location, like Big Brother. In DC the joke is if Cheney dies of a heart attack Bush could become president.

They set this thing up and Continuity of Government means that you don’t have the democratic government anymore, you have a bunch of pre-selected people that are going to make the decisions. So Reagan Airport—DC National Airport but they named it after the idiot—most of us there call it DC National—they couldn’t open afterwards and it was going to be indefinite and they complained and the transportation authority said, That’s not up to us. You have to go to the National Security Council and FEMA and the DoD. That’s who’s making the decisions now. So this was a couple months after.

[1:48:10]
... I also brought with me—and if you haven’t seen these you should probably try to get them—this is called First Impressions: American Muslim Perspectives on the 911 Commission Report by the American Muslim Task Force and it’s available from American Muslim Task Force online. Then this is the 120-page redacted, still somewhat redacted, last monograph from the 911 Commission staff. But both of them have important stuff. And then the best antidote to the Report is Paul Thompson’s Terror Timeline [book] which is just a factual timeline with public sources for what happens coming up into 9/11 and then minute-by-minute during it.

But there’s homework to do. I know it’s a post literate society and I know the FBI wants to know what everybody’s reading at the library. I don’t think they could probably deal with my list. But it’s why I never did Freedom of Information on myself I don’t have room for all the files.

But I think—this is just one piece—the reason that I focused on 9/11 is the same reason I focused on the Kennedy assassination when I was young, the same reason I focused on Jonestown: these were major propaganda lies being told about things that were recognizable to the whole U.S. American public. And this lie of 9/11 has been used as the trump card to beat us down into accepting the permanent war economy and the civil liberties and all the rest of it. So cracking this lie, if it can be cracked—I don’t think it can be cracked by throwing urban mythology at it—but I think it can be cracked and to do so it has to be understood at a much higher level than what most people are going after.

It’s not the mechanics that are going to crack it. It’s really understanding a covert operation and what is the source of it. We don’t have all those pieces yet—we don’t even have enough pieces to prove whether it came from inside or was just allowed to happen. But it’s not impossible to get those pieces or to break this Report down with its own testimony and with what little they’ve already given us which contradicts the conclusions that it reaches.

But I think it’s important to try to crack it and crack it in a way that ordinary people can look at it and see the question. Because people are questioning it. The families themselves said 70% of their questions that they had were not answered by the Commission and ordinary people have questions about it if you make it clear to them. I think that it’s possible to use that then as leverage to get people to ask about the deeper questions: about the control of their life, and the lack of a real democracy here.

I think not only are we in the place where the German people were in September of 1939 in terms of our responsibility and the threat of the rise of global fascism. Mussolini called fascism corporatism plus reaction. He said it was when the state and the corporations merged into one. That is objectively what fascism is. Fascism is not Adolf Hitler, an anti-semite, that decides to get a whole country to go along with killing all the Jews and tries to take over the world. It is an objective economic and political reality that develops from the final stages of monopoly capitalism. When wealth concentrates to a particular level and when technology moves forward at a particular level, human labor becomes expendable.

The first people killed in the Holocaust were the mental patients because they were useless eaters, they were taking up space, they were untermenschen. The American Psychiatric Association, the World Psychiatric Association, the world eugenics associations were like this [fingers held up side-by-side]. They believed that they could clean the gene pool out. In fact the defense at Nuremberg was, Why are you taking us to court for this? You started mass sterilization in 1928 in the United States. You started getting rid of these people that didn’t fit in the gene pool and the feeble-minded. You taught us how to put people into concentration camps with what you did to the Native Americans. And we’re just doing what you did so why are you taking us to court? I mean one genocide doesn’t justify the next but it’s a legitimate question that we seem unable to ask.

Basically we blame the rest of the world for what we’ve done and the situations that we’ve set up. These things are being done in our name. After 9/11 all these people said, Well why do they hate us? It’s like, Well if you don’t know history—and many people don’t because they don’t teach it in school—you don’t know what’s being done in your name abroad for the last 50 years. But the people in those countries know. They know the corporations that came in. They know who came in and stole their labor. They know who put the dictator in that repressed them. They know where the money was coming from. They see what the relations are to the US military and the US State Department in the embassy there. They’re not fooled. But the American people have to be kept in the dark about it. Because it’s being done in their name.

So we feel, We’re benign—don’t we give a lot of foreign aid to people abroad? Yes. 70% of it happens to be weapons. But, it's, We’re the good guys and the rest of the world is evil and we don’t understand why anybody would hate us. And then they came out and told us that bin Laden is attacking us because we’re a large pluralist democratic rich country and they just can’t stand that. And I said well why aren’t they bombing Canada too? Could it be something to do with Canada’s foreign policy maybe?

It’s not to justify the deaths. It’s a crime against humanity, what happened on September 11th. But it’s a crime, not an act of war. It should have been dealt with, as Nuremberg was, in an international tribunal. The Taliban said three times they would turn bin Laden over to an international tribunal and Bush said, We don’t negotiate with terrorists. But that was the proper response. Not the wars that they wanted to go into and all of that phoniness.

But they’ve got us so afraid of each other and afraid of everybody else around the world and that’s a classic protection racket. You know what a protection racket is for the mob? The window in your store gets broken and Louie comes by: Oh, sorry about the window. You know, a hundred dollars a month or so probably make sure that don’t happen again. But uh you don’t want to pay it you know something worse could happen, place could burn down or something.

That’s a protection racket. I mean I’m supposed to be more afraid of bin Laden in his cave – Doctor No Sama, where’s James Bond? – than I am of the system that created the cave and that created the threat and that armed the threat, and that as far as I can tell, manipulates the threat. Maybe as a negative asset, maybe as a positive asset. I don’t know. But I mean, I’m afraid of the people that are taking my life and my democracy and the lives of people all around the world away. It’s like Malcolm X said, If you read the newspapers long enough you’ll end up loving the people doing the oppressing and hating the people being oppressed. And you’ve got to figure out what that is.

The other thing you have to figure out is what fascism is. Because fascism, that corporatization, is now not just a couple of—it’s not Tyson Steel and IG Farben. It’s international global corporations. It’s Hitler gone global, gone mad. He might have wanted to take over the world but the corporations that were financing him weren’t already the world and didn’t own so much of it. It’s a global lineup of these countries at the top—the United States and the European Union and the new wannabes: China—joins the World Trade Organization September 12—first call to Bush is from Putin—and Russia. They want to line up. Then the rest is the pockets of resistance within the neoliberal countries and the underdeveloped masses, those are expendable, and then us—the people here that are going to resist.

Overall when you don’t need the labor anymore—they don’t need the labor in Iraq to run those oil wells—so that population is expendable to them. And then based on where your racial views are, based on whatever your genetic views are, you’re going to pick those segments in the society that can go first or that you’re not going to worry about. Maybe you’ll speed it up a little. Reinhard Gehlen suggested that the concentration camps—he was Hitler’s head of intelligence, in his memoirs—at the end of the war were too messy and that they ought to figure out how to create natural disasters that wipe out hundreds of thousands of people at a time.

But the objective pressure of that concentration of wealth—if you’re not going to make that surplus and that’s what it is: objectively the world is in surplus. Objectively there is enough arable land, there are enough resources, there is enough technology for every single person on earth to be clothed and housed and fed, to have medical care, to have transportation, to have communication, to be interneted even, to be entertained without the destructiveness to the rest of the planet, without wiping out all the rest of species, without destroying the ozone layers and all of that. There are alternative energies that would work. But it takes a decentralized model to make them work. It takes a community model to make them work. But they’re there.

Objectively they’re there. And if all you do with that surplus is control it and consolidate it into the hands of a few, then the rest of us are the untermenschen. That’s just the outcome—there’s an objective pressure for genocide because you don’t need those people and they potentially represent a threat to you. And then certainly along the racial lines where you dehumanize whole segments of the population.

So that’s the nightmare path. And of course it also takes a permanent war economy and permanent war, end of civil dissent, end of the Constitution, martial law, and all those things. That’s the nightmare path—but we’re at that crossroads now. We don’t have a lot of time. We don’t have all the wiggle room we could. But we’ve got more wiggle room than anyone else on earth to not go down that path. To change that path in the other direction toward a world that’s different.

But in order to build that world you have to have the imagination to understand not only what your enemy is and what form it takes—of this global fascism and these international relations and the economic relation that capitalism forces all of us into with each other and how that could be broken; how you pull back aspects of human community that have been stolen from you and then sold back to you in their most distorted form by this system.

But you also have to have the imagination to see what a real democracy would look like. I would submit to you that the democracy envisioned by Thomas Jefferson was not adequate in his mind for the following generation and he said it himself. He said there will probably have to be a revolution in this country every 20 years to make sure that power doesn’t aggregate again in the hands of the few. He said he wouldn’t expect his children to wear a threadbare coat that he owned just because he liked to wear it. He said if he built a fort around them to protect them from a threat and the threat went away he wouldn’t force them to live in the fort any longer. He said that even if he planted a tree so they could have fruit to eat and they didn’t like the fruit he wouldn’t force them to eat it. These are his metaphors for—he knew that his imagination only stretched so far and that then every subsequent generation would have to imagine and realize its own freedom, it’s own sense of democracy.

The other thing Jefferson realized, and Washington as well, is that parties, political parties are inimical to democracy. Jefferson said that in any given society you can only have two parties no matter what they call themselves. Those who want to take power from the people and put it in the hands of the few, he called the aristocrats. Those who want to do the reverse and put power in the hands of the people he called the democrats. But he said if you build a democratic government machinery and you build a constitution that’s actually democratic and a social contract that’s democratic, you don’t need a democratic party. Washington, when he left office, said that policies belong to the people as a whole and that parties put those decisions back in the hands of a few.

When you lived in the 1700s your only method of communication and travel was either a horse or a boat. When the meeting you had to go to was going to be two days away by horse, the whole community couldn’t go so you picked a representative to go; smaller community, maybe not too far fallen from the tree; probably picked the guy you wanted around the least and sent him off for two weeks to listen and be your representative and then bring back the report.

We’re in the 21st century. We don’t rely on a horse and a boat. We have mass communication. It’s a common wealth. You’ll say, The corporations own the media. They don’t own the media. They monopolize the licenses. The licenses are issued on the basis of it being a common wealth and they’re issued by the public to the broadcasters. They own some of the broadcasting equipment. That hardly seems insurmountable. But it is still a common wealth that belongs to all of us and it’s our public media so we should take back sufficient time to raise issues with each other and debate them in an open way and then everyone participate in the decision-making power that we should have. Because that’s a power that belongs to all of us.

We know by now—don’t we?—that any representative that we would put in our stead can be blackmailed or bullied or bulleted or bribed. It’s not so hard to control four or five hundred people. It’s a little harder when the decisions rest in the hands of us all. And it can be done in a fair way, it can be done in open way. You also have to break open the common wealth of the educational system here so that people get real information.

See government..... Jefferson said given a choice between a government without a newspaper and a newspaper without a government he would always choose the latter. Because he understood that the flow of information is more central to democratic process than the machinery you set up to carry it out. But that’s all that is—is machinery that you set up to carry out your vision of democracy. And if it ain’t working then you dismantle it and you put some machinery together that makes it happen in the right way.

And, I mean, I don’t vote for representatives. I have two buttons. One says: If Voting Worked It Would Be Illegal. And the other says: Don’t Vote It Only Encourages Them. I would gladly vote for referenda but not the kind of referenda they have out—and in issues they have in many of the places out here because those are rigged so that only the rich can get enough signatures to get over the hump. But if you made voting registration automatic, if you made it very simple to put something on the ballot and then maybe chose what were the most popular ones for each month and ran them, then you could debate them and you could choose by them. But there’s no reason not to be making those decisions—especially when they affect lots of people—and no reason not to be making them on a decentralized level. Not all on some kind of a national or state level but a decentralized level that thinks globally and acts locally but also does the reverse: that when it acts globally it thinks locally. And you can put those two things together.

Then if you’re going to pay taxes—and there are alternatives of alternate money and not having a money or a tax system and all that—but if you’re going to pay taxes, we have a bumper sticker in DC that says Taxation Without Representation because we don’t even have a voting representative. We have Eleanor Holmes Norton who can go and sit on a committee but she can’t vote. My version of representation with taxes is not Eleanor Holmes Norton voting for me because she doesn’t represent me. I doubt I could represent anyone else in the room here much less all of you. Why would I want to try? I can represent myself perfectly well. As can you.

If your response to this is, Yeah but people are too stupid. Jefferson thought of that too. He said the only safe repository for power is in the hands of the people. He said if you think them unable to exercise their discretion in a wholesome fashion—that means you think they’re idiots—he said the solution is not to take the power from them and put it in the hands of an elite. The solution is to inform their discretion; that you have to trust rationality, you have to trust communication, and the ability that we can educate each other and ourselves about things. Does it mean we’d never be wrong? No. But I would tell you we will fix a mistake sooner than this system will fix a mistake and we won’t vote for things that are obviously not in our own self-interest on a broader scale. Will there be differences? Of course there will be. But breaking through some of those other things would make it possible.

But if I was going to pay tax to the federal government I think that I would want the last page of the Tax Form to be an allocation form. Now that would be taxation with representation. Because I would directly allocate the tax that I paid. And I even want to just send a three-part carbon out to everybody that pays taxes in my community and show them a brochure with a pie: here’s where your money’s currently being spent. Here’s your blank pie. Fill it in. Put one in with your tax form—doesn’t have any legal weight but tell them how you’d like the money to go. Send one to your representative or put it in the drawer. And send one back to me. I’ll take the results. I’ll put them into a people’s tax pie. I’ll go to the voting record and put up the representatives tax pie. I can guarantee you they won’t be the same pie. And then I’ll ask the representative to come out and explain who it is that they’re representing.

Now it’s very simple but it plants that seed. You’ve got Bush running around saying, It’s your money. It’s your money. And I said, Yes it is my money and I want to allocate it. I don’t want the chump change back that’s left for social services after you overfund the Pentagon and the CIA. I want to spend the money myself. Okay? And it’s a process.

I’m not saying these are magical solutions. But if you don’t start thinking of a different way to invent democracy this late then we are going to go on the nightmare path. And if you don’t understand that your loyalty belongs to the human race and not to a flag, not to a country that’s supposedly under attack from some mystical force that’s out there that you can’t even identify—I mean, these terrorists, the way they’re presented to us, it’s as if they dropped in from outer space. All you know about them is that they hate you and they want to kill you. You can’t negotiate with them. You can’t talk to them. You can’t understand them. All you can do is kill them. And you got to kill every last one except, you never know.... It’s like the pod people, you know, maybe it’s spread to somebody else and then you got to start killing them. And how long is it before you start fingering each other? Well, I think you’re one of them.

It’s just dead end. It’s the 21st century. We know what war does. And now the weapons that make it happen are so bad that the planet is not going to survive. If we don’t make war obsolete, we’re going to make ourselves obsolete. I don’t know, I mean maybe I’m talking to the choir here. I went to Bemidji, Minnesota recently. I had a great time. I talked to people in the community and people in the school and classes of kids and stuff like that. But these ideas are ideas, I think, that aren’t beyond ordinary people. But we’ve got to be willing to break down, even in ourselves, a tendency to want dogma. I’m not telling you this stuff so you’ll follow me around and say, Well I’m a Judgeist.

I do these things because I’m hoping that a little bit of humor, a little bit of perspective, it’ll open up something for you that you’ll look at the paradigm in a different way. In fact I wanted to write a memoir, and thinking about a title of a memoir would be Brother Can You Paradigm? Because if you can’t paradigm you’re in trouble. It’s not that everything they’re telling you is a lie. But the focus, the lens, they’ve got is a little skewered so that you don’t see it straight when you look at it.

And I’m in trouble already: you can go on the internet and find out that I’m a government intelligence agent and I’m part of a disinformation campaign because I say that Flight 77 went into the Pentagon. I don’t think it’s a burning question about 9/11. I think they are much bigger questions. But Flight 77 did go into the Pentagon. There were hundreds of witnesses that saw Flight 77 go in to Pentagon. I’ve talked to quite a few of them.

You’ve got all these people not only saying is it a question but it’s a religion. If we approach our belief systems as religions then we’re going to put people out in the street and away from us. But if we approach it as respect between two people and let’s see if we can’t get to the truth; in my lectures people come up afterwards and say, Gee, you talked about this and my uncle did that. The little piece of a woman at the picnic table.

If we told the stories of our own families, the whole system would break. They do what they’re doing because they are deathly afraid of us. They need for us to be in denial. They need for us to try to protect the little bit of privilege we have over somebody else rather than sharing. They need us to keep the needle in our arm, the television on, the consumer mentality going; keep quiet, consume and die; and they’re afraid of us. And they need us to feel that we are powerless.

But we are the least powerless people on the planet. And there might be a way for the whole rest of the world to stand up to this juggernaut but it wouldn’t be easy. But where the potential is to stand up for it is right here, among us. And the moral responsibility to stand up to it is right here because it’s being done in our name and it’s being done each day. And we can build another world. We can invent another world. We can include each other. We can build community. We don’t have to be afraid of each other. But we have to tell the truth. And once we tell the truth to ourselves and to others, once we pull the needle out of our arm and say I’m not playing anymore, that’s it. Game’s over.