Last night on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox show, Geraldo Rivera went after Charlie Sheen and dismissed his call for a new investigation into the attacks of September 11, 2001, as the ravings of a lunatic. “It’s like one of these things like Area 51 with the aliens in New Mexico,” said Rivera (Area 51 is in Nevada). “I think [Sheen] has a trip gene, or a screw loose.”
Rivera said Sheen has “swallowed this kool-aid where in defiance of the facts, in defiance of the historical record, in defiance of their own own eyes and witnessing what happened when those planes smashing into the buildings, and I think unintentionally I am sure they are hurting the victims’ families, the survivors, because they continue to raise this preposterous notion that the United States government would be so hideously manipulative that we would kill almost 3,000 of our own citizens as a pretext to got to war in Afghanistan.”
In fact, the United States had drawn up plans to invade Afghanistan prior to the September 11 attacks. “The details of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan which fought the Taliban and al-Qaeda after the September 11 attacks, were largely taken from a scenario examined by Central Command in May 2001,” General William Kernan, commander in chief of the Joint Forces Command, admitted after the invasion.
On September 18, 2001, Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, said he was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October, according to the BBC. Naik was told that Washington would launch its operation from bases in Tajikistan, where American advisers were in place.
“To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11,” Tony Blair told the Times in July of 2003 (as quoted by Michael Meacher in the Guardian, September 6, 2003).
Rivera’s claim that a benevolent U.S. government would not attack its own citizens is disproved by the historical record.
“In the early 1960s, America’s top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba,” ABC News reported on May 1, 2001. “The Joint Chiefs even proposed using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn during the first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext for war with Cuba, the documents show.” The plan was codenamed Operation Northwoods and was presented to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962 (see Pentagon Proposed Pretexts for Cuba Invasion in 1962, the National Security Archive).
In his book, Towers of Deception – The Media Cover-Up of 9/11, researcher and author Barrie Zwicker documents numerous instances of government creating false flag terror attacks in order to frighten the public and forge consensus for war or to force political change.
“In his controversial book critical of both the 9/11 ‘official story’ and the media coverage of the events, Zwicker goes through the history of false flag operations dating back to the 1600s, and among many examples, cites the February 27th,1933 fire of the German Parliament (Reichstag fire) three days prior to Germany’s federal election,” writes Aaron Dykes for the Jones Report.
Governments have historically and habitually staged false flag attacks and murdered their own citizens for political gain.
For instance, the CIA, in league with NATO and reactionary elements in Italy, killed innocent citizens as part of a “strategy of tension” designed to divide, manipulate, and control public opinion. The Israeli government is notorious for false flag attacks, most notably the planned bombing of U.S. diplomatic facilities in Egypt in the early 1960s. Evidence reveals that the Russian KGB conducted a wave of bombings in Russia in order to justify war against Chechnya and catapult Vladimir Putin to power. Further examples are legion, including the Turkish government bombing its own citizens and Indonesia’s role in the Bali bombings.
Geraldo Rivera is either oblivious to history or as a well-paid minion of the military-manufactured news complex his job is to distort history through omission and propaganda.
As well, Rivera did not bother to mention that a large number of 9/11 victim families, first responders, and over 60,000 New York citizens are demanding a new investigation. Or did he mention that thousands of supporters of the victim families have engaged in political activism since the attacks, have demonstrated against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and are outraged that 9/11 was used as a pretext for those invasions and to build a police state at home — a fact Rivera claims does not exist.
History is on the side of those who understand that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were indeed an inside job perpetuated by a cynical elite in order to manufacture a contrived war against terrorism and thus turn the planet into a high-tech surveillance grid and a police state. It is also used as a pretext to further the objectives of the so-called military-industrial complex and promote mass murder campaigns against recalcitrant nations and populations, for instance within the tribal areas of Pakistan.
The arguments presented by Geraldo Rivera are bankrupt and that is why he mentioned Charlie Sheen’s checkered past – it is the only weapon the corporate media has against the truth. That’s why Bill O’Reilly concluded the segment with the suggestion that Sheen is crazy. Rivera and O’Reilly, brahmins of the corporate media and official lies and fabrications, including the 9/11 fairy tale, have no other choice but to dismiss Charlie Sheen and the entire 9/11 truth movement as mental defectives.
Addendum
Rivera’s bombastic diatribe against Charlie Sheen should be contrasted with his dubious reporting in the past. In 2003, while “embedded” with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, he disclosed a military operation by drawing map in the sand for his audience. After the military complained, he was relocated to Kuwait. “If they’re going to get us, it’s going to be in a gun fight. It’s not going to be a murder. It’s not going to be a crime. It’s going to be a gun fight,” he said during a report from Afghanistan. Rivera announced that he was carrying a gun, odd behavior for an ardent opponent to the Second Amendment (Rivera often promoted gun control prior to his time reporting in Afghanistan, such as when — after the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado — he asked, “How much longer are we gonna take it? How much longer are we gonna be wrapping in the flag of patriotism to justify 250 million guns out there? How much longer?”)
Moreover, as the journalist John J. Miller notes, Rivera is a pathological womanizer. “I’ve had thousands of women, literally thousands,” he told Playboy in 1989. “Figure it out for yourself. If you had a different woman every couple of days, and you do it for some years running, it just adds up.”
As for Bill O’Reilly, he did not mention Charlie’s checkered past — and for good reason. Andrea Mackris, a former producer of O’Reilly’s show, filed a sexual harassment suit against O’Reilly in 2004. In her complaint, Mackris produced quotations from phone conversations between herself and O’Reilly in which he suggested various sexual fantasies he had for her. Mackris dropped her lawsuit after Fox News and O’Reilly agreed to pay her an undisclosed settlement amount, said by the Washington Post to be well over one million.
