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9/11 -
Too Hot To Handle?



Exclusive to Rense.com
by Douglas Herman
December-8-2005



"If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us
down the street and lynch us." -- George HW Bush





A couple weeks ago, just out of curiosity and in the interest of
fairness,
I decide to email a hundred mainstream media news editors from
newspapers large and small. I wanted to get their own remarks to four very
innocuous but pertinent questions regarding THE EVENT that spawned two
foreign wars based on lies, massive government spending, enormous corruption
and cronyism, vote fraud, crimes against the Geneva Convention and
destruction of the US Constitution and the
Bill of Rights, not to mention the rather minor (by comparison)
Valerie Plame affair.



That event, of course, was the 9/11 attacks that opened the Pandora's
box to ALL the felonies that followed.



So I wrote polite emails to nearly one hundred news editors around
America. I opened with the query: "Dear Editors, Do Joseph Pulitzer's words
still apply today?" Then I added Pulitzer's quote (below), just in case some
of the news editors may have forgotten who JP was
and what he tried to do.





"Iwill always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice
or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any
party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack
sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never
be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent,
never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or
predatory poverty."

-- Joseph Pulitzer, April 10, 1907

My fourth question to the editors, particularly, may have struck a raw
nerve. "If you personally became suspicious that 9/11 was possibly an inside
job--by a rogue element in the government--would you suppress the story
rather than inform, and thus distress, your readers?"



I sent along a few links to well-researched 9/11 news stories, topics
we on the Internet are familiar with and can openly discuss. Nothing too
shocking or far-fetched, but simply well researched reports of discrepancies
that should awaken the skeptical instincts of any good editor. Two 911
Planes Were Never Deregistered, for example, and BYU Discredits Prof Jones
For 911 WTC Paper!
Like I said, nothing that we on the Internet can't handle.



I received ONE (1) response.



Is 9/11 the story that may NEVER be mentioned in the polite mainstream
media? Rare indeed to read an article in the local newspaper, airing even
one of the many contradictions--and there are hundreds-- to the Greatest
Unsolved Crime of The New Century.



I wrote to some editors twice, before I concluded, by their stony
silence, that 9/11 was the one topic that may never be questioned---EVER-
in the US mainstream media. As noted muckraker and tenacious Internet
reporter, Greg Szymanski wrote: "Pulitzer may be turning over in his grave,
wanting to pull his name from the prestigious awards given out yearly,
considering the media's pathetic coverage of 9/11,
he PATRIOT Act and doctoring of WMD intelligence reports to
sell the war in Iraq."



For example, New York Times "reporter"-and I use that word
loosely--Judith Miller once won a Pulitzer Prize, believe it or not. One
can thus conclude that news awards, as presented by the self-congratulatory
US press, have become almost a fraud perpetrated by phonies as awards for
fakery. Otherwise the US news media would be attacking rather than ignoring
the mountain of discrepancies in the 9/11 event. The US media might even con
clude that, yes, 9/11 was indeed an act of terror.
An act of terrorism conceived after weeks of secret planning in some
five-sided fortresses, by a cabal of war criminals, double agents and
nefarious profiteers.



The response to my brief questionnaire did not surprise me.
Rather it appeared to coincide with what I have come to expect from
the US media, especially newspapers. That is, little or nothing.



Henry David Thoreau observed: "I never read any memorable news in
a newspaper." But I keep reading them hoping to be surprised one day.
I suppose I'm a self-appointed inspector of newspapers.



Like a lot of Internet writers, I used to send some of my best columns
to my local newspaper. To their credit they published two. They never paid
for either but then most newspapers have their own stable of writers and
contributors who live thousands of miles away. Local writers, especially
the majority of hard-working Americans who "hold these truths to be
self-evident," seldom see their opinions in print.



One California citizen, a frustrated letters-to-the-editor writer to
his own local newspaper, understood this well. And so he composed his own,
widely read, Freewayblogger Manifesto. "Sure anybody can write
a book, article, or a letter to the editor," he said. "You might even
get it published provided the publisher and/or its parent corporation agrees
with what you have to say."



And if they do NOT agree with what you say, you will be effectively
ignored or silenced in that community.



I wrote to the news editors and publishers of my local newspaper, the
South Florida Sun Sentinel. I wrote to them twice, asking about 9/11.
I wrote to editors Earl Maucker and Kingsley Guy and Chauncey Mabe.
I even wrote to the Sun Sentinel publisher, Bob Gremillion. I politely
asked them: "Does the US media purposely avoid reporting news stories of
9/11 contradictions that conflict with the official government version of
events?"



No response. Twice.



I wrote to the editor of the Austin American-Statesman.
The editor, Rich Oppel, had written a recent column I admired.
He concluded, "The business of journalism has changed, not always for
the best. Yet the journalism of journalism had not changed.

In those still-fierce faces and voices of the aging editors, I saw and
heard idealism and ideas at octane levels that made them driven and
eternally young."



Sounded fine to me, in theory.



I wrote to editor Oppel twice. Hoping for that "still-fierce"
idealism.
I thought Rich might live up to his words. At least in print, editor
Oppel sounded a lot like that idealistic New York news editor that actor
Michael Keaton portrayed in an entertaining movie,
The Paper (1994).



No response. Twice.



I wrote to sixty Editors from the San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle
Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Austin
American-Statesman, Los Angeles Times, St. Louis Post Dispatch, and the
recent Pulitzer Prize winning Toledo Blade before I finally gave up.



I even wrote to the trio of Blade reporters who wrote that Pulitzer
Prize-winning piece about the war in Vietnam. (How The Toledo Blade came to
win a Pulitzer for a Story That Was 37 Years Old).



I had hoped that those three award-winning reporters, Joe Mahr,
Mike Sallah and Mitch Weiss might email me back. Maybe write me
that 9/11 was hotter than depleted uranium (another topic off limits
to the MSM media) and admit that they couldn't touch it. I mean, it took The
Toledo Blade 37 years to focus on atrocities in Vietnam, ignored by the US
media. Imagine how many centuries it might take for the MSM to focus on
9/11?



The one editor gutsy enough to answer my emails? Jim Wilhelm from The
Toledo Blade. Here's his reply, in part.



"Without looking at the 'example,' (links) I personally don't believe
the U.S. media would purposely avoid reporting such stories. There are lots
of reasons information that comes to the attention of a newspaper or other
media are not reported, some of them having to do with whether they can be
properly substantiated through sources and documents that would stand up in
a court of law."

Okay. Reasonable response, right? But not even a smidgen of curiosity
to examine the well-researched links I sent? Sadly, Jim Wilhelm, like all
the other editors, ignored the information that might not "stand up in a
court of law," even the very same mainstream media reports that appeared
immediately after the attack but never surfaced again.



Unfortunately, 9/11 researchers have been clamoring for just such a
court of law. Some in the 9/11 Truth Movement, like Mike Ruppert and Jimmy
Walters, have even challenged people to come forth and either sue them or
prove their shaky contentions, that 9/11 happened as the mainstream media
reported it. Walters even promised a million dollars to anyone who could
bring a little PROOF to the discourse,
simply saying, "Reopen 9/11 - Catch the Real Terrorists"



No takers so far.



Wilhelm replied to my fourth question--the one that likely struck a
raw nerve with every editor who works in the US media. Recall, I had asked:
"If you personally became suspicious that 9/11 was possibly an inside
job--by a rogue element in the government--would you suppress the story
rather than inform, and thus distress, your readers?"



"The question--- like most of the others above, is loaded,"
wrote Wilhelm. "If I had the resources (for example, reporters in
Washington) I would pursue such a story. I would not willfully suppress
such a story if I had substantiated information."



Curiously, guys like Greg Szymanski, way up in Idaho, without a huge
news organization behind them (The Toledo Blade employs 146 newsroom staff),
without a newspaper paying a decent weekly salary or even a reporter's phone
bills, can manage to uncover more substantial bits and pieces to the puzzle
of 9/11 than ALL the editors I queried.



They may not "willingly suppress such a story" but the truth about
9/11 may not win any Pulitzer Prizes for, oh, 37 years.



Amateur historian and novelist, Douglas Herman writes regularly for
the Worldwide Web, the last bastion of truly Free Speech and of gutsy
reporting. He is the author of the controversial thriller,

The Guns of Dallas (about the Kennedy Assassination)



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