So what exactly made Van Jones a "truther" by the media narrative? Well it was this statement which he signed on to in 2004. Well to be fair its not really the WHOLE statement that did it. It was basically this line from the statement.
In connection with this news, we have assembled 100 notable Americans and 40 family members of those who died to sign this 9/11 Statement, which calls for immediate public attention to unanswered questions that suggest that people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.
Now I have to admit, that is one helluva statement. I can even understand people being repulsed by it. But see as much as the Dick Cheney's of the world want to remind us of just how scared out of their shorts they were after 9/11 in order to justify torture, I can also remember how many questions went unanswered with the 9-11 commission report and how after we rushed into the Iraq War lots of people were drawing crazy conclusions. LOTS OF PEOPLE. Seriously, are you going to tell me none of you people out there reading this ever watched the viral video "Loose Change"? Hell I will admit I did, several times. So I guess that insures I will never work in the federal government. But I digress.
Having said all that about that statement, lets first look at the actual questions on the petition.
1.Why were standard operating procedures for dealing with hijacked airliners not followed that day?
2.Why were the extensive missile batteries and air defenses reportedly deployed around the Pentagon not activated during the attack?
3.Why did the Secret Service allow Bush to complete his elementary school visit, apparently unconcerned about his safety or that of the schoolchildren?
4.Why hasn't a single person been fired, penalized, or reprimanded for the gross incompetence we witnessed that day?
5.Why haven't authorities in the U.S. and abroad published the results of multiple investigations into trading that strongly suggested foreknowledge of specific details of the 9/11 attacks, resulting in tens of millions of dollars of traceable gains?
6.Why has Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator who claims to have knowledge of advance warnings, been publicly silenced with a gag order requested by Attorney General Ashcroft and granted by a Bush-appointed judge?
7.How could Flight 77, which reportedly hit the Pentagon, have flown back towards Washington D.C. for 40 minutes without being detected by the FAA's radar or the even superior radar possessed by the US military?
8.How were the FBI and CIA able to release the names and photos of the alleged hijackers within hours, as well as to visit houses, restaurants, and flight schools they were known to frequent?
9.What happened to the over 20 documented warnings given our government by 14 foreign intelligence agencies or heads of state?
10.Why did the Bush administration cover up the fact that the head of the Pakistani intelligence agency was in Washington the week of 9/11 and reportedly had $100,000 wired to Mohamed Atta, considered the ringleader of the hijackers?
11.Why did the 911 Commission fail to address most of the questions posed by the families of the victims, in addition to almost all of the questions posed here?
12.Why was Philip Zelikow chosen to be the Executive Director of the ostensibly independent 911 Commission although he had co-authored a book with Condoleezza Rice?
Now many of these questions are provocative to be sure, but do any of them smell like "truther" questions? Not really.
So lets take two seconds to think on this. Could the 9/11 truther people, pushing their own agenda, perhaps presented the signatories with just the questions they would be demanding be answered and then added the caveat about 9/11 being an inside job after the fact? Seems pretty likely to me. But I don't want to just rely on my gut feeling, besides maybe I am just biased in favor of Van Jones right? (I admit I am a fan). So lets look around the list of signatories and see what we can see shall we?
Now I want to just throw something out there before hand. As far as I can tell the only "evidence" that Van Jones was a truther, believing in his heart of hearts that 9/11 was an inside job is this "truther statement". The internet being what it is today and with Jones' extensive public speaking as an advocate of a green economy, you would think something would show up in a search where he, speaking in his own voice, offered up an opinion about 9/11 being an inside job. But to date no such writings nor speech has been found. And don't believe for a second that the intertubes haven't been scoured for somethign like that by the FoxNewses and the Glenn Beckites of the world. But again, I digress.
Now to be sure, there certainly are some truthers on the list. I won't even look up "birther" Phillip Berg who is currently still trying to get President Obama out of office by suing him for his birth certificate. But lets look at just a random name or two. Lets look at say Catherine Austin Fitts. She is a signatory and she was also Asst. Secretary of Housing in the first Bush administration. She now has a blog of her own and you can look at it here. If you put "9/11 investigation" into the search engine it spits out several articles/posts which relate to it. It would seem that if Ms Fitts is not a true "truther" she at the least remains very interested in an investigation into 9/11.
Ok how about Medea Benjamin, co founder of Code Pink. Is she a truther? Well I found this statement from hers, also from 2004, which comes close to the "truther statement" but doesn't go all the way in calling 9-11 an inside job. Again you can make a judgement on your own, and for sure Code Pink is truly a far left anti war group. I just don't know that "9/11 was an inside job" has been their rallying cry over the years.
How about another signatory, former CIA analyst and professor at the National War College, Melvin Goodman. Now I found this online chat of his from right after George Tenet resigned from the CIA in 2004. Please recall that Tenet resigned not over 9/11 but over the false pre Iraq War intelligence. He took one for the team so to speak. Now if ever here was a time for Goodman to come out strong for 9/11 being an inside job this would have been it. It was after all the same year that he supposedly signed on as a "truther". Instead as part of an answer in the chat session he characterized it this way.
Mel Goodman : Tenet should have resigned when Clinton pushed him into the policy of the Middle East peace process in 1999; he should have resigned after 9/11 because of the intelligence failure; and he should have resigned when the White House dictated the kind of intelligence it wanted. Tenet stayed because he wanted to please his masters....you can never win in the bureaucracy when you start to tailor the intelligence.
What the hell? What does he mean "intelligence failure"?! Don't truthers think that the intelligence was there but the government disregarded it?
Just throwing it out there.
Now there are two other signatories of the "truther statement" that I also found some information on. Crazy lady, former member of Congress Cynthia McKinney, and also Jenna Orkin. Now I am not holding up McKinney in any way shape or form. She seemed to have lost her damn mind the last few years or so. However its still worth illuminating what is publicly available on the interwebs. This is from 2006, obviously a couple of years after the "truther statement".
It is a matter of public record that the government did not always voluntarily tell the whole truth about 9-11. In the first days after the tragedy, the EPA said the air was safe (see "Truth Out," page 32). The Bush administration claimed there had been no warnings of the attacks. A congressional inquiry was prevented from discussing information the intelligence community provided to the White House. The White House resisted forming an independent commission, stalled on releasing documents, delayed in allowing Condoleezza Rice to testify in public, and agreed to let the president meet with the commission only on the conditions that there be no oath administered, no formal transcript made, and that Vice President Dick Cheney be at his side. Several members of the commission had to recuse themselves from parts of the probe because their government or private-sector careers posed conflicts. And in its final report, the commission punted on such questions as where the money for the attacks originated, dubbing that issue "of little practical significance."
The long list of obfuscations and obstructions has helped the Truth movement attract sympathizers who don't buy the idea that the attacks were planned by the government. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney of Georgia has taken up some of the movement's themes. Actor Ed Begley Jr. co-hosted a September 11, 2004, Truth event in New York because of his environmental concerns. "As to the other more fantastic theories about the events of 9-11, I don't care to comment, other than to say that they have raised some very interesting questions that I would love to see answered," Begley tells the Voice in an e-mail.
Another environmental activist, Jenna Orkin, also admires aspects of the movement but distances herself from others. "I think it's terribly important," she says, "to distinguish between the legitimate questions and the wackiness—and the wackiness has contaminated the legitimate questions in a very destructive way."
Now, in total, it probably took me all of 10 minutes to find this information. Is any of it definitive either way? I suspect not. But I think most of it casts a lot of doubt on whether signing on to that "truther statement" in 2004 meant you were actually a truther. And let me say something else, just keeping it 100, I am not exactly a great blogger. Truth be told my forte isn't really tracking down information. But there are a LOT of liberal and progressive bloggers who not only know how to track down information, but also have just enough juice to have sources that will talk to them on or off the record. And just as a reminder, you won't find even this kind of stuff on Van Jones if you check the internet. His involvement in trying to get answers to questions about 9-11 seems to begin and end with this statement. And yet where was at least the attempt to do any push back for Van Jones when this tempest in a teapot sparked up? Hell for that matter where has it been in the after math? Why in the hell are so many so called liberals and progressives so willing to just wash their hands and say good riddance when it comes to Van Jones?
Well I have a theory on that. And ironically its directly because of the fuckery of the right wing as to why Van Jones was allowed to be thrown under the bus.
See a lot of us on the left having been having a lot of fun calling out the "birther" wingnuts, those idiots who keep contending that President Obama isn't a natural born citizen. Mind you there is an actual birther bill in Congress right now with several GOP co sponsors whom nobody has asked to resign their seat but hey IOKIYAR is always in full effect right? But see the pushback almost from the get go on any criticism of the "birthers" has been the Pee Wee Herman defense of "well yeah but X percent of Democrats think 9/11 was an inside job". That is of course, total bullshit, but it has been repeated so many times by the wingnuts on TV with out many if any liberals or progressives calling bullshit on it that the mainstream media has started repeating it as fact.
So you see this was the perfect Trojan Horse to throw at Van Jones. The right wing knows that the left has so many cowards that as soon as the issue of him being a "truther" came up, people would run for the hills. And, of course they were right. Mind you it was obvious to most of the people paying attention that this was really about "Color of Change" a group that Jones co founded, going after Glenn Beck's advertisers. And they didn't just go after them, they got the overwhelming majority of them to pull their ads from Beck's show. So of course Jones had to pay.
What was perhaps most interesting to me was how "good white liberals" were so quick to try to dismiss the notion that racism played a role in this too. As a black man I am intimately aware of how screaming racism every five minutes diminishes situation where real racism is at work. But you would have to damn near be blind not to see the racial angle to this. If not directly at Jones, then directed at President Obama through attacking Jones. And yet a prominent "good white liberal" blogger/journalist, who ironically spends a lot of his time tracking right wing hate groups, opined on his twitter page the other day that we shouldn't "obsess over race" lest we come off as "whiny" because Van Jones did himself in by being a "truther". Setting aside for a moment just how much this guy came off sounding like Pat Buchanan, lets focus on the fact that he had no evidence at all other than this 5 year old statement, that may or may not have been accurately presented to Jones before he signed it, to prove that Jones is or was a "truther". Yet here this "good white liberal" was stating it as a fact, on his twitter page, to make sure none of us happened to say race played a role. (full disclosure, another prominent white liberal blogger pushed back hard on this notion and for that he gets major props from me). Mind you, we had just seen the most blatantly racist attempt to derail a Supreme Court Justice EVER in our country's history, and yet when confronted with that, this blogger/journalist dismissed it because Obama had "won" on that one.
Seriously.
It couldn't possibly get any better for the right wing.
They know "good white liberals" don't want to be smeared as playing the race card, which wingnuts love to throw around whenever the issue of racism comes up. So they were free to say whatever they wanted about Jones, real or imagined, knowing that they wouldn't have to answer for their race baiting.
See this episode says as much about the left as it does about the wingnuts. We have all kinds of talent in the media and the blogosphere and only a fraction of it even attempted to stand up for Van Jones. And Jones was one of the true lefties, ie one of us, in the Obama administration that would have been pushing for progressive legislation in the green energy sector. And we just stood their with our thumbs up our collective asses lest the right wing call us mean names.
Well allow me for a moment to call bullshit on that.
I realize that I am very low on the totem pole and honestly thats probably for the best. See for a lot of my fellow liberals and progressives they would probably see me as being too "over the top". I curse, I talk shit, I believe in hard nose politics, I don't like "moral victories", I favor progressive policies over elected officials, I would rather fight and lose than be quiet and hope for the best. For many liberals and progressives that's just not behavior that's in the handbook. Well I for one think the handbook needs to be changed. Once liberals and progressives grow our spines back and start standing up and fighting for what we believe in we will bring more people into the fold. Don't get me wrong, there are some strong liberals and progressives out there, but for the most part we are upstarts fighting against the establishment. Which is why we get to be lumped into the "far left" even though most of our policy positions are in the mainstream if not the majority of public opinion. Well even people who agree with us, now refuse to self identify themselves as liberals or progressives. And that is because we continue to look like a bunch of bed wetting cowards.
You want to know how the right wing would have reacted had Van Jones been one of theirs? Well first of all they would have invoked the first amendment which allows them to say whatever the hell they want without any threat of blowback. Secondly they would have pointed out that there were also 48 family members of people who died on 9/11 who signed onto that statement and anything people are saying about Van Jones would apply to them as well. Which would of course be reprehensible, and they would demand an apology on behalf of those family members. They would have brought up the issue of the 9/11 commission and how the Bush Administration stalled its creation over and over, didn't cooperate with it when it was formed, and how the Commission's Report was blasted because of all of the subjects that it didn't address. And you can rest assured that they would have also brought up the fact that not a single solitary person in the Bush administration was fired after 9/11, well unless you count Richard Clarke, the one person who was actually ringing the bell about Al Qaeda and who was ignored for his trouble. And guess what, Democrats and lefties would have backed the hell off and let Van Jones be. What the hell is wrong with this picture?!
If the last 8 years has taught us anything its that people will follow an idiot as long as they feel like that idiot will fight for them. And let me tell you, because of our actions or rather inactions as it pertained to Van Jones you might as well get ready. We are going to have a BUNCH of more fights on the horizon now. Hopefully the establishment liberals and progressives will start to read the writing on the wall and get ready to start pushing back. If not we will look up a year from now and not only see the prospects for liberals running for Congress very low, but also an Obama administration either missing key people or even more stocked with "centrists" in key positions than it is already.
It is what it is.
P.S. If you want to know why it was worth fighting for Van Jones, just read this profile of him from a few years ago.
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