News Corp. owned National Geographic’s 9/11 documentary more interested in feelings than facts

Dees Illustration

Madison Ruppert, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Almost every single American who has had the unfortunate pleasure of watching the channel owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, Fox News, has witnessed their never-ending support for the Bush administration and pseudo-conservative politics in general.

Of course, Bush and most modern day American “conservatives” and “Republicans” are an insult to the nomenclature, but that is an entirely different story unto itself.

A National Geographic documentary is scheduled to be aired on Saturday, August 28th according to the Daily Caller, two weeks before the 10-year anniversary of the tragic events of September 11th, 2001.

The producer of the piece, Peter Schnall, has no problem admitting that the documentary’s treatment of the events will completely circumvent fact in favor of how George W. Bush “was feeling”, as if the feelings of the junior Bush had any impact on the events and the egregious breaches of liberty and democracy that ensued.

To any rational person, the feelings of the former President of the United States should have no more importance than the feelings of you or me.

It is also likely that most Americans realize that feelings should never trump facts, especially when it comes to the most major event that has shaped geopolitics for the past decade.

However, Murdoch’s News Corporation and their subsidiaries much prefer to tug on heart strings and address feelings instead of the cold hard facts. One would hope that they might cast aside their agenda when addressing this issue, but one would be deluding oneself in doing so.

The documentary is composed solely of Bush’s responses to Schnall’s questions and the account is supposedly apolitical.

Schnall, who compiled the documentary out of two days’ worth of interviews with George W. Bush, said that, “There were no politics, no agenda as he recalled what happened that day. What you hear is the personal story of a man who also happened to be our president.”

It appears that this documentary is going to be filled to the brim with lies, misrepresentations and deceit in order to continue the false “War on Terror” narrative and the official story of 9/11 which is filled with more holes than Gaddafi’s Tripoli compound.

One of the biggest lies pushed by the documentary (inaccurate though the nomenclature may be) was revealed by the above linked Daily Caller Article on the soon-to-be-aired film.

“It changed my presidency,” [Bush] explains. ”I went from being a president primarily focused on domestic issues, to a wartime president — something I never anticipated, nor something I ever wanted to be.”

This is an outright lie and the fact that they are still peddling this thoroughly debunked deceit is nothing short of offensive.

In reality, Bush already had plans drawn up to begin the global war against al Qaeda days before the September 11th attacks. He thoroughly anticipated the war and clearly enjoyed playing the role of wartime president.

The documentary also continues to push the blatant lie that George W. Bush and his cronies in Washington were not aware of the possibility of the attack.

This, like the outright lie that Bush was not seeking to go to war, has been thoroughly debunked as well, even by the mainstream media!
 
CBS reported in 2009 that Bush indeed knew that there was the real possibility of al Qaeda hijacking planes.

In an attempt to mitigate the damage this knowledge did, former White House Spokesman Ari Fleischer said that, “while President Bush was told last summer that bin Laden’s al Qaeda network might hijack planes, “until the attack took place, I think it’s fair to say that no one envisioned that [using planes as suicide bombs] as a possibility.””

Interestingly enough, the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO, was actually planning an exercise on the day of September 11th in which a plane was crashed into one of the buildings. Allegedly, this was not a terrorism drill but a simulated accident.

That being said, is it not a bit coincidental that the NRO was planning an exercise that mimicked the events of 9/11?

Furthermore, is it not at least noteworthy that American Airlines flight 77 (the plane that allegedly crashed into the Pentagon) took off only 50 minutes before the exercise was slated to begin?

Now, I am by no means a dogmatic “9/11 truther” in that I am convinced of only one thing: the official story of the events of that day leave far too many questions unanswered. I am by no means an adherent to any specific “conspiracy theory” that attempts to explain that day, as I have never seen any irrefutable evidence to support one.

I do, however, find it impossible to swallow the official story and in doing so force myself to ignore the dozens of unanswered questions and holes in the official account of that day.

Like many Americans, I will never forget the day of September 11th, 2001. I also refuse to allow the memories of the brave first responders and the innocent victims who had their lives taken that day to be spit upon by those like George W. Bush who use 9/11 as a political football to this day.

The Daily Caller article made me, and will likely make many of my readers, quite upset. I find it deeply personally insulting to see that George W. Bush still believes Americans are imbecilic enough to look past all of the facts and side with him.

Peter Schnall clearly does not hold the same conviction as I, as he is seeking to subvert the truth to make a heart-wrenching drama that will get good ratings. As an American, I am disgusted by having to admit that Schnall is among us, using the deaths of thousands of Americans to serve his own agenda.

Like Schnall, Bush desecrated the memory of all who died that day by utilizing September 11th to rally support for the fraudulent war on Iraq and the non-threat that was Saddam Hussein.

Within hours of the attack the Bush administration was quick to begin drawing up plans for the attack on Iraq, regardless of the fact that Saddam Hussein had absolutely no involvement in the events of 9/11 whatsoever.

Hussein did not even have ties to al Qaeda, but of course this didn’t stop Bush and his cronies from using thousands of dead Americans to make a buck.

I believe that we must look back on that day with a critical eye. We must mourn the deaths of thousands, but in doing so we must not allow ourselves to be manipulated by the military-industrial complex who have used that tragedy to justify the murder of millions abroad.

Documentaries like this are an attempt to continue the false narrative and to force Americans to pledge their undying support for illegal and unnecessary warmongering in the name of freedom and democracy.

In reality, 9/11 spelled the death of freedom and democracy in America and arguably much of the world. Until more Americans realize this, we will continue to be dragged into conflicts and be driven further into the black hole of debt at the behest of the elite.

I, for one, refuse to have my country changed from what should be a beacon of peace and hope for the world into a beacon of hate, oppression, corruption and murder for the world to fear.

Only by calling out Schnall and others who attempt to subvert the truth on a regular basis can we triumph and show the world that there are still many Americans who know what is really going on and refuse to be a part of it.

UPDATE: I came across a decent Think Progress article on this same subject. What I think to be the most important passage is quoted below.

Will producer Peter Schnall critically, and accurately, explain to the public Bush’s actions during and after the horrific 9/11 terrorist attacks? In a recent interview about the program, Schnall said he tried not to push “it too far” with the former president, and that he was “less interested in facts than how” Bush “was feeling”:

“He would only take it to so far,” Schnall tells Zap2it. “If I had pushed it too far, he might have shut down a bit more, and my goal was to get him to talk about those four or five days. I was less interested in facts than how he was feeling.”

News Corp. has a long and complicated relationship with the Bush administration. In addition to promoting the Bush political agenda for two terms on Fox News, former Bush aides have flocked to the corporation as employees (Bush’s top strategist and spokeswoman, Karl Rove and Dana Perino, are among the many Bush admin alumni seen every day on Fox News). Bush’s assistant attorney general Viet Dinh, the “chief architect” of the PATRIOT Act, is an influential board member of News Corp.
now overseeing the investigation of the hacking scandal now embroiling the company.

But if there’s any doubt that News Corp. isn’t serious about its latest attempt at Bush hagiography, take a look at the publicity effort around the documentary. On Tuesday, Matt Dornic promoted a special viewing of the documentary on the FishbowlDC website. Dornic is a staffer for Quinn Gillespie, News Corp.’s lobbying firm and public relations agency in Washington, DC.