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| RESPONSE TO PETER PHILLIPS by Wayne Stewart You wrote in "Conspiracies, Plots and Other Anti-democratic Notions" (http://www.commondreams.org/views02/views.htm): Additionally, we can advocate strongly for mainstream media to invest in democracy by supporting investigative reporting on key issues. The Director of the Chicago Office of the FBI, Tom Kneir, admitted on August 17 at the American Sociological meetings that the FBI conducted an investigation into the pre-9-11 stock options, but he refused to disclose who bought the stock. Mainstream media needs to pursue this issue using our freedom of information laws to put the conspiracy questions to rest. I think your call for open government and open media is admirable, but naive. Investigative reporting and freedom of information can seriously threaten power elites (e.g., Watergate, Iran-Contra, etc.); so as long as those elites have the power they will do their utmost to thwart such activities. Media corporations are now clearly working actively against true investigative reporting on topics of significance (see Kristina Borjesson, "Into the Buzzsaw"). George W. Bush and John Ashcroft are taking proactive steps to make the FOIA as ineffective and difficult to use as possible within the CURRENT constraints of the law. The American people don't need to know who was firing from the Grassy Knoll on 11/22/1963 to know that their governmental INSTITUTIONS concealed, destroyed, distorted, altered, and fabricated evidence in the JFK case (as well as the RFK & MLK cases). The record is there for anyone with an open mind and the necessary interest to examine. These are not the actions of an open, honest government with nothing to hide. Maybe it's enough for most of us to know that we don't know who else was firing rifles that day - that if our government and media have their way, we never will - that after 15+ years, when our government finally could admit to a probable conspiracy, they and their compliant media never cared enough to find out and tell us who else was shooting and why. The American people don't need to know who bought the pre-911 stock options to know that the FBI is not revealing the results of its investigations. That's clear enough from the incident you cite in your article. For many, it is enough to know that of all the "huge public and private bureaucracies" "interlinked in a macro way" or not, none of them are coming forward with the true facts of 9/11, the JFK assassination, or SOME of the other events that you lump together at the beginning of your article. And now with the "Homeland Security" bill, an independent investigation into 9/11 failures is prevented by law. Maybe it was just a coincidence that Life magazine locked away the Zapruder film for so many years as our governmental agencies were actively trying to perpetuate a truly ridiculous explanation of this momentous event in our history. However, after looking at who was sitting at the top of Life magazine at the time, I tend to find "interlinked" conspiracies a more reasonable explanation. As Gore Vidal put it, "Apparently 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth." Perhaps what we need, now that we know the news is censored, is a "Project Unspeakable Truth". Copyright 2002 Wayne Stewart |