“An example that shows the radical devaluation of thought is the transformation of words in propaganda; there, language, the instrument of the mind, become ‘pure sound,’ a symbol directly evoking feelings and reflexes.” - Jacques Ellul, Propaganda

“A leader or an interest that can make itself master of current symbols is the master of the current situation.” - Walter Lippman, Public Opinion

By Edward Curtin - September 11, 2025

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, was a non-teaching day for me. I was home in Massachusetts when the phone rang at 9 A.M. It was my daughter who lived and worked in New York City and was on a week’s vacation with her future husband. “Turn on the TV,” she said. “Why?” I asked. “Haven’t you heard? A plane hit the World Trade Tower.”

I turned the TV on and watched a plane crash into the Tower. I said, “They just showed a replay.” She quickly corrected me, “No, that’s another plane.” And we talked as we watched in horror, learning that it was the South Tower this time.

Sitting next to my daughter was my future son-in-law; he had not had a day off from work in a year. He had finally taken a week’s vacation so they could go to Cape Cod. He worked on the 100th floor of the South Tower. By chance, he had escaped the death that claimed 176 of his co-workers. My father’s good friend, retired from a NYC job and living in Pennsylvania, had a one-day-a-month consultancy job at the Twin Tower. Tuesday the 11th was his day to die in the North Tower.

That was my introduction to the attacks. Twenty-four years have disappeared behind us, yet it seems like yesterday. And yet again, it seems like long, long ago. But long ago is today when the repercussions of what happened then “lie” behind today’s terrible events, as they do because Bush, Jr.’s Global War on Terror continues on its mad and doleful way under three more presidents and different linguistic mind control narratives.

As I type these words, I look down on my desk at my grandfather’s gold badge: Deputy Chief of the New York City Fire Department. Two of his brothers, my great-uncles, were members of the Fire Department and another a NYC cop, a sister a public school teacher. My other grandfather, my cousins, niece and her husband were NYC Police Officers. My grandfather’s nightstick hangs on a nail in another room. A great-great grandfather owned a popular tavern in the West 40s and another a livery stable on the West Side.

Having grown up in the Bronx, gone to high school and graduate school in Manhattan, I have long and deep family roots in NYC. My Irish immigrant ancestors were sandhogs who dug the tunnels for the subways, the tunnels bringing water down to the city, and the foundations for the skyscrapers. This history goes deep and high, for my niece was a detective and her husband an anti-terrorism detective who flew over the Twin Towers in a helicopter on that fateful morning, taking so many of the famous photographs of the devastation below.

I tell you this to emphasize how the city, where my family goes back 175 years, is in my blood, and the news my daughter conveyed to me affected me deeply. No matter where you roam in later life, as many native New Yorkers will attest, such bonds tie you back to what we call The City, and when its foundations are shaken as they were on September 11, 2001, so are you at a very deep level.

Thus the truth of how and why these tragic events happened on a glorious September morning became my quest. It began emotionally but soon turned logical and objective as I followed my academic training in the sociology of knowledge and propaganda.

Over the next few days, as the government and the media accused Osama bin Laden and 19 Arabs of being responsible for the attacks, I told a friend that what I was hearing wasn’t believable; the official story as reported by the media was full of holes. It was a reaction that I couldn’t fully explain, but it set me on a search for the truth. I proceeded in fits and starts, but by the fall of 2004, with the help of the extraordinary work of David Ray Griffin and other early skeptics, I could articulate the reasons for my initial intuition. My specialty throughout my long university teaching career has been propaganda, so I set about creating and teaching a college course on what had come to be called 9/11, on what I had learned.

But I no longer refer to the events of that day by those numbers – 9/11.

Let me explain why.

By 2004 I was convinced that the U.S. government’s claims (and The 9/11 Commission Report) were fictitious. After meticulous study and research, they seemed so blatantly false that I concluded the attacks were an intelligence operation led by the neoconservatives – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. – who had become central elements within the George W. Bush administration and whose purpose was to initiate a national state of emergency (that is still in effect in 2025) to justify wars of aggression, known euphemistically as “the war on terror.” The sophistication of the attacks, and the lack of any proffered real evidence except hyperbolic empty accusations for the government’s claims, suggested that a great deal of planning had been involved and a coverup was underway.

Yet I was chagrined and amazed by so many people’s insouciant lack of interest in researching arguably the most important world event since the assassination of President Kennedy. I understood the various psychological dimensions of this denial, the fear, cognitive dissonance, etc., but I sensed something else as well. For so many people their minds seemed to have been “made up” from the start. I found that many young people were the exceptions, while most of their elders dared not question the official narrative. This included many prominent leftist critics of American foreign policy. Now that twenty-four years have elapsed, this seems truer than ever.

So with the promptings of people like Graeme MacQueen, Lance de Haven-Smith, T.H. Meyer, Jacques Ellul, et al., I have concluded that . . .

[SNIP]