The September 27, 2004 issue of The Nation has a review of David Ray 
 Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor... written by Robert Baer, celebrated 
 CIA agent (whose career involvement with the agency is acknowledged 
 on the review's lead page). Griffin's book has a foreword by Richard 
 Falk, who sits on The Nation's advisory board. But that hasn't 
 inhibited the editors from frying the book in lard. 
 
   Baer's review is a heavy load of condescension, flustered contempt, 
 false dichotomies, and a few undisputed facts, borne along by that 
 old workhorse: the claim that elites can't possibly conspire in 
 something horrible (like the murder of an American President in 1963, 
 or three thousand people in NYC in 2001) and then execute it, because 
 (1) too many people would need to know in advance, and (2) once done, 
 it wouldn't remain a secret. 
 
   Well, FBI field agents like Robert Wright and Colleen Rowley who 
 desperately tried to prevent 9/11 were stopped by one man, Special 
 Supervisory Agent David Frasca --- not by the entire FBI. All that's 
 required are a few well-placed, key people. As for keeping it a 
 secret, of course the big crimes can't be kept secret. That's where 
 The Nation comes in. 
 
   The best way to cope with the emergence of uncomfortable truths is 
 to declare that they can't possibly be true, since if they were, they 
 would have emerged by now -- ahem. Let's go to a commercial.
 
   The facts have come out. Read Michael C. Ruppert's new book, 
 Crossing The Rubicon (New Society Publishers) and Paul Thompson's The 
 Terror Timeline (Harper Collins). Both are built entirely from 
 mainstream news sources and direct testimony. Then ask yourself 
 whether Dick Cheney and elements in the Pentagon would have foregone 
 trillions of dollars and decades of oil out of concern that the facts 
 might come out. They're out! But if they're not in The Nation, 
 they're not facts.
 
   The usually-recommended response to a review like Baer's is a Letter 
 to the Editor. Since The Nation prints this sort of CIA-driven 
 disinfo quite often, there are ample opportunities to find out what 
 happens to such Letters to the Editor at that particular publication. 
 They go into a pretty trashcan with a peace sign on it.

   Fortunately, it is still possible to find analysis that transcends 
 the marshmallow-bellyache of this Babyboomer Flagship Publication --- 
 in the peace-trashcan and in some other places:
 
   Here, Mark Robinowitz has assembled an excellent set of resources 
 about left-gatekeeper phenomena --- the politics, the psychology, the 
 practice, the personnel:

 http://www.oilempire.us/denial.html
 http://www.oilempire.us/gatekeepers.html#thenation
 
   And here, Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed offers a major treatment of 
 left-gatekeeping targeted at Z-Net in particular (especially David 
 Corn and Michael Albert): "9/11 'Conspiracies' and the 
 Defactualisation of Analysis: How Ideologues on the Left and Right 
 Theorise Vacuously to Support Baseless Supposition --- A Reply To 
 Z-Net's 'Conspiracy Theory' Section"
 http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq37.html
 
   Here, I take a shot at The Nation for its embrace of a disingenuous 
 book by Mark Riebling that alleges a tragic "wedge" (Jamie Gorelick, 
 who learned so much from this book, called it a "wall") between the 
 CIA and FBI: "Failure and Crime Are Not The Same" 9-11's Limited 
 Hangouts":
 http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/112203_failure_crime.html
 
   And here's another: "Bad Faith Again: An Open Letter To The Nation
   Magazine"

 http://www.mediamonitors.net/jameyhecht1.html
 
   Helloooo, trashcan!
 
   Best wishes,
   Jamey Hecht, PhD
   Author, Plato's Symposium: Eros and the Human Predicament