'The Only Real Solution Is Justice with Compassion' and 'Truth Is the Way to Peace': two Columns from the post-" '9/11/01' " Series for the SF Bay View, 2001

The "What A Plot!" Series for the Bay View Records How We Received the False-Flag Attack and 'Unprecedented Propaganda' of September into November 2001

The Big Lies that are fundamental to the “ ‘Israel / Hamas’ “ War, the Bie Lies that surround us in the Western world, this October of 2023, echo and miroor to me another set of shocks, another ‘Attack’ accompanied by Big Lies. I mean the most triggering pretext for invasions, repression and Wars in the 21st century, “ ‘9/11’ “, and Governments’ and Corporate mass-media’s headlining of us into the U.S./U.K.-led invasion of Afghanistan in Autumn 2001.

Reprinted below are the first two of my columns for the San Francisco Bay View that became the ‘What A Plot’ series, from September 12 to December 12, 2001.

The Bay View was then about as grassroots as a patch of would-be lilies by the Sun Dial on Hunters Point Hill. The ‘National Black Newspaper of the Year’ had its cramped, second-floor offices next to the Bus-Stop intersection of Third Street and Palou in a District, 10, that was dominantly Black, Latino, Chinese and Samoan. The highly contaminated Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, home to a 47-acre Landfill of Nuclear Waste, lay over the hill beside the Bay and Candlestick Park. Mary Ratliff edited the Bay View long into most nights and her husband Willie, Publisher, delivered the 25,000, 16-page copies of each Edition to Black and Brown neighborhoods of San Franciso, Oakland, Richmond, … in his compact, Japanese-import truck.

Such was how grassroots and marvelous the The Bay View was. It scraped along with magnificent rebelliousness and I was honored to have my ‘Across the White Divides’ column on its back page. alongside the neighborhoods-oriented column by Marie Harrison. Marie was an activists’ activist who’d become a dear friend and inspiration during the eight months that Malik Rahim and I co-managed her campaign to be elected Supervisor of District 10 in the year 2000.

We lost that campaign, but did work with a cross-San Francisco Coalition that won the largest plurality, 83%, and the largest number of votes, some 214,000, of any Ballot Measure in the City’s history of Elections. Our Measure required City, State and Federal Governments to clean up the Shipyard to livable (‘residential’) standards. We had so many Worthy Enemies of health in Hunters Point, circa 2000-2005, including PG&E and the Lennar Corporation and the San Francisco Housing Authority and its Crack-dealing operation.

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001 I got news in middle of the East Coast day, approaching 9:00 a.m. in San Francisco and 12:00 Noon in New York City, of the staggering “attacks” and losses of life that morning. By mid-afternoon on both Coasts a Palestinian group, the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation Of Palestine, became foremost on Networks’ News as claiming responnsiblity for the attacks.

Here are my first two Bay View columns of 2001 about events and causes of nass destruction on 9/11/01— ‘The Only Real Solution Is Justice with Compassion’ and ‘Truth Is the Way to Peace’, . Columns related to the ‘War on Terror’ continued into that Autumn, four more in total. Research and revelations brought me to the sixth and concluding column’s title and content, ‘The Most Enormous and Evil Scam in U.S. Ruling-Class History’, published on December 12, 2001. Willie Ratliff said just before that came out: “You better find you some place to hide.’” The ‘What A Plot!’’ columns led to many friendships, including that with Yuri Kochiyama, one of the most stalwart revoltionaries whom I’ve known.

Photo above by Shiu Hung at a 9/11 Citizens’ Grand Jury event in Berkeley, January 2004.

The columns below are as they appear in 2008’s book The World Is Turning: “ ‘9/11’ “, the Movement for Justice, and Reclaiming American for the World. The W I T compiles two books, 2002’s “ ‘9/11’ “ / Facing Our Fascist State and 2005’s To Prevent the Nezt “ ‘9/11’ “ with several interviews, reviews, and articles from the seven years’ time-span.

I know: it’s complicated. We continue to learn just how complicated and yet how concentrated are the conspiracies that would STEAL OUR WORLD.

These columns--like this book, The World Is Turning …--trace the evolution of my understanding of how the world works. On September 11, 2001 I believed that Muslim hijackers must have carried out the attacks of that day in the United States, as I believed that they had obvious reasons for retaliation against this nation and faith to suicide themselves, Such was the basis for my first San Francisco Bay View column on the attacks.

The next day, 9/12/01, I saw the then 34-minutes-long gap in the timeline between the second hit to a Twin Tower and the hit to the Pentagon. This gap (Why was American Airlines 77 not intercepted?) caused my doubts about our Government's and massmedia's portrayal of the day's events to leap upward. I began to pursue alternative explanations.

The Bay View columns document a day-by-day gathering and gleaning. They're reprinted [in 2008 and now in 2023) because their information might still be valuable and their findings might still register with others who are pursuing truth about " '9/11' ". Since concluding the six ‘What a Plot!’ columns, however, I've come to see that forces less obvious than nations or a greedy hunger for pipelines and oil direct modern history. I've come to see that a much larger plot, a plot that goes back more than two centuries, a plot whose consistent aims are orchestrated from generation to generation by financiers and their central Banks, a plot relying on acts of terror to provoke wars which maximally advance financiers' profits and control, is most responsible for events whose implausibility and interrelationship handfuls of vastly outnumbered terrorists command airliners with box-cutters, the U. S. Military fails to intercept hijacked airliners over more than an hour, skyscrapers collapse into their footprints at nearly free-fall speed, and the Western world's mass-media is as one in failing to ask enormously obvious questions) are otherwise difficult to explain.

First, however, to my/our days and weeks of shock and seeking in the Fall of 2001.

THE ONLY REAL SOLUTION IS JUSTICE WITH COMPASSION (published Sept. 12, 2001)

Again, this day that could lead to a truly new world order, Tuesday, September, 11, 2001, thousands of innocent people have died due to attacks from the air--thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of hard-working, family-loving civilians, none of them witting or willing combatants in war--all of them dead in single moments of terror that together encompassed less than two hours.

Again, the world looks on with stunned horror at the enormity and suddenness of devastation and loss.

Again, relatives of the dead and dying--wives, husbands, daughters, sons, mothers, fathers, ...--wonder how they will ever recover from this nightmare of news, this wrenching rip to their innards and futures, knowing that they can never replace the ones lost.

The difference today is that the victims, the ones lost, did not live in Palestine or Israel or Iraq or Yugoslavia or Somalia or Afghanistan or Sudan or Japan--or in Bayview Hunters Point.

Instead, they lived and worked in the commercial and military hearts of the United States.

Few who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and. four American and United airliners today knew the desperation, the long and brutal history, the generations of futile struggle and false hopes, that moved their killers.

As of now, Tuesday afternoon in San Francisco, September 11, the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine is reported to have claimed responsibility for the attacks.

The hijackers of the crashed airliners, however, might have come from dozens of groups that are aggrieved by policies of the United States Government. In 1993 more than 60 entities said that they’d set off the bombs that almost toppled the World Trade Center towers.

Few here receive information other than through Corporate media. Thus, few here know how Palestinians have been betrayed in the eight years since the ‘Oslo Peace Accords.’ Few know how Israeli settlements have bitten from Palestinean territory. Few know how Israel and its current head-of-state, Ariel Sharon, provoked the current uprising or intifada. Few know how Palestinean’s official leadership has implored the United States to broker terms of a peace that could last--one that would relieve the de facto apartheid that Israel has imposed on Palestineans since at least 1967. Few know how often Israel has resorted to missile attacks on Palestinean civilians in the past two months. Few know that more than seven times more Palestineans than Israelis have died in the uprising that began last September. Few here even know that Israel receives more than 5 billion in aid from the U.S. each year.

Few here will have heard the judgment of Madeline Albright, Secretary of State for the Clinton Administration, that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S.-led sanctions since 1991 was a “reasonable” price to pay.

Few here know that the U. S. missile attack on China’s Consulate in Yugoslavia during the War in Kosovo, an attack that killed three civilians, was a deliberate and brazen warning.

Few here notice the anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombs’ holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, holocausts that each killed about100,000 people.

Changing Our Course

What happened today changes everything in terms of the material balance of forces in the world.

No object that the U.S. Government holds sacred can ever again be seen as secure. A dozen well-trained people, ready to sacrifice themselves, can do untold damage.

Modern, technological society is most vulnerable.

What remains to be seen is whether the United States Government will now change its moral course.

Today even Network anchors have to acknowledge the “anger” and “bitterness” that much of the world feels toward our Government. Arab spiritual leaders speak of “the oppression, exploitation and injustice” that the United States has perpetrated.

We must now do the right thing.

If we have the clarity and strength to see that our own Government’s forms of mass murder--both international and domestic--have produced the terrible, desperate and unprecedented response of today, we have the chance to go forward to a solution.

The military retaliation that our Government’s leaders are already threatening (“Make no mistake ... We will pass this test ... Our military stands ready ... We will hunt down and punish the terrorists”) can only escalate warfare. More boundaries will be violated, more means will be found, and thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands more of innocent people will be killed.

A woman down the street where I live worries about “germ warfare--from us and from them.”

Our only real safeguard, our only way out of the minefield that belligerent arrogance has made of the world, is to stand with justice, to fight for justice, and to let “Help the poor” be our watchword.

TRUTH IS THE WAY TO PEACE ... DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE ... AND A PRAYER FOR GEORGE W. BUSH (published Sept. 19, 2001)

How can we really begin to solve the problems that led to last Tuesday's attacks?

How can we really prevent more of the warfare that kills thousands of innocent people in the U.S. and elsewhere?

In 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King nominated the Buddhist poet and monk Thich Nhat Han, exiled from his home country of Vietnam the previous year, a year of increasing war, for the Nobel Peace Prize that Dr. King had won in 1964.

Thich Nhat Han, now 75, continues to speak around the world. He says that only through suffering can a person gain understanding and compassion.

Thich Nhat Han urges the practice of “deep listening, compassionate listening, and loving speech” to penetrate the blocksof bitterness and hatred between people who have long opposed each other. Practice of his teaching has brought Israelis and Palestineans to work together for peace.

Thich Nhat Han also urges us to seek truth as the foundation for solving problems. He urges us to use each day as a step toward finding clarity, courage and compassion.

With such teaching in mind, teaching that’s like that of Christ and Muhammed as well as the Buddha and many others, let’s look at the terrible events of last Tuesday, September 11, events that have forced us to repeatedly view TV-fed horrors, and try to find truth, clarity, courage and compassion.

We’ll have to ask hard questions. Our questions will have to go beyond the headlines and broadcasts that drum 'WAR' and "War" in Corporate media.

The longer that I look at events of Tuesday, September 11, the more that global information reveals to me about them, the more doubtful the stories told by NBC (owned by General Electric), CBS (owned by Westinghouse), and ABC (owned by Capital Cities/Disney) seem to me.

Check out these questions.

Is it credible that 18 or more men could have escaped detection in boarding four airliners at three major U.S. Airports with knives and other weapons within one hour?

Is it credible that the planning for such precise and multiple attacks, preparation that even Network TV “experts” estimate must have taken months, could have escaped detection by U. S. and all Western intelligence-agencies? Wouldn’t students with Arabsurnames at flight-schools in Florida be an alert to U.S. intelligence?

Then there’s the sequence of crashes.

How could American Airlines Flight #77 lumber into the Pentagon, uncontested, 35 minutes after the second crash by an airliner into the World Trade Center (9:38 a.m. EST versus 9:03 a.m.)? Wouldn’t the nation’s air defenses be on Red Alert no later than 9:03? Shouldn’t F-16s have scrambled to defend the nation’s capital no later than one minute after 9:03?

Then there’s Corporate media’s immediate coverage. Why did CNN report for hours that the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine had claimed responsibility for the attacks, when CNN’s only basis for the report was one phone-call from Abu Dhabi?

Why such a rush to judgment by Corporate media?

The cumulative weight of these questions, facts and coincidences reminds me of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the cover- up of probable truths about that killing.

More than half a dozen people have separately said to me since last Wednesday: “There’s something fishy in all of this.”

I think the best protection we have now, the best antidote we have to vengeful hysteria among a sadly underinformed public, is to consider and investigate as fully as we can the possibility that at least one part of the U.S. Government at least allowed the attacks of September 11.

Who and What Stand to Gain from “The Terror”?

Let’s look now at who and what stand to most benefit from effects after the attacks. “Follow the money,” said “Deep Throat” during Watergate. Nikolai Lenin said the same thing as to causes of World War I.

Big Oil and fascistic repression in this nation stand to gain a great deal now.

The price of a barrel of crude oil has already jumped more than $5 on world markets. We know that George W. Bush’s Cabinet is thick with ties to oil-and-gas Corporations.

Other economic interests are relieved of pressures by the attacks.

Strategic metals were in a tailspin due to the downturn in production of computers--now their main exchange, COMEX, is gone with World Trade Center.

In fact, the entire prospect of blaming Republicans for a Recession/Depression is now gone from from the news.

At the same time, protest against the Corporate neo-colonialism that’s called “globalization” is now sidetracked. Unions in the AFL-CIO have dropped their participation in protests against the IMF/World Bank that were scheduled for the last week of September in Washington, DC.

Any dissent is imperiled by the “necessary” repression of civil liberties for which Government officials, led by the President, are now calling.

George W. Bush’s approval rating has jumped to 89% in Corporate polls. Congress has given him $40 billion and more war-making power than any President has wielded since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

We should therefore recall prior pretexts for ‘WAR’ by the United States. We should indeed “Remember Pearl Harbor”--and remember our Government’s foreknowledge of Japanese attacks (see the books Infamy and Day of Deceit). We should remember the sinking of the Maine in 1898 that let Hearst newspapers demand the Spanish-American War. We should remember the sinking of the Lusitania that got the U.S. into World War I and thus protected J.P. Morgan from tens of millions of German debts. We should remember that the illusory " 'Gulf of Tonkin Incident' " in 1964 let the U.S. go full-bore into Vietnam.

We should, in short, be very careful about what we believe.

We should be watchful about defending our own hard-won freedoms and rights. In the middle 1980s Oliver North and others in the U.S. Government, many of them confidants of then Vice-President George Bush, planned ‘Operation Rex.’ ‘Operation Rex’ would have swept 400,000 potential ‘dissidents’ in the U.S. into concentration-camps.

Dissident now means me. It may also mean you.

Justice and Peace

George W. Bush has told the nation that we must “hunt down, find and whip terrorism” in order to “do future generations a favor” and “rid the world of evil.”

What would the military campaign that George W. Bush promises mean to us in the U.S. and to the rest of the world?

Would it mean bombing Afghanistan, the presumed refuge of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile who’s the presumed “mastermind” of a “terror network” that’s presumed responsible for the September 11 attacks (though Afghanistan and bin Laden deny any connection to the attacks).

Would it mean invading Afghanistan?

The campaign that George W. Bush promises would kill thousands or tens of thousands or hundred of thousands more of innocent civilians. It would subject the U.S. public to further terror. Supplies of water, oil, gas and even air here are vulnerable to attacks far easier to accomplish than the crashing of an airliner into the Pentagon….

Injustice is the source of terrorism, whether terror is used to enforce injustice (the bombing of Lebanon, the bombing of M.O.V.E.) or to resist injustice (Israelis against Britain, Palestinians against Israelis).

Efforts to replace basises of injustice with basises for justice are therefore the only possible “end” to terrorism. Equity is the only worthy basis for peace. Justice can be the only lasting solution.

We need to ask further questions about our immediate peril. Our questions must be hard and material. Should the U.S. re-engage in the “peace process” between Israel and Palestine? Should Israel return the West Bank to Palestinians? Should Arab nations guarantee Israel sovereignty in a Treaty that the United States backs? …

Answering such questions could lead to a truly new world order. We must hope that George W. Bush is strong enough to ask and answer such questions.

We may know that he came to the Presidency through tactics that particularly took the vote from African-Americans and Jewish-Americans. We may know that he’s always profited from privilege. We may see him as insecure from being overshadowed by his father and younger brother. We may know that he’s worried about passing tests. We may find his world-view simplistic at best.

We must nevertheless listen deeply to what there is in George W. Bush, I suggest, even as we ask hard questions about him. If we can see what moves him--what capabilities and incapacities, what conceptions and misconceptions, drive him--we may better understand how we came to September 11 and its aftermath.

Last night I woke up with worries around 4:00 a.m. You may have too. A line came to me that felt like a gift from the Creator.

Truth is the way to peace, it said. Truth is the way to peace within each one of us and truth is the way to satisfaction between ourselves, I heard. Truth is the way to peace between States.

Let us hope that George W. Bush pauses and looks for truth: Truths about himself, this nation and the world. At the same time, let us do everything we can to bring the greatest material power on Earth to courage, clarity and compassion.

Thus we can respect the lives lost so pitiably last Tuesday--imagine being smashed and smothered under rubble--lives perhaps given so that we may face realities--and the many more lives lost before last Tuesday.

(Don Paul works with Marie Harrison, Malik Rahim, Alma Lark, Duc Nim and others in Housing Is a Human Right. He thanks you all for the emails!)