The Garden

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

The above quote, written by James Madison in 1788 in The Federalist No. 51, eloquently expresses a fundamental problem I see in governance: corruption.

To this day, virtually everyone accepts that there is corruption in governance. Disagreements about the extent of corruption are usually discussed as matters of degree—i.e., how much corruption exists.

Politicians are often considered greedy, dishonest or untrustworthy, but we’ve grown to expect and embrace that. We tolerate lies. We tolerate wasteful taxing and spending policies. We tolerate special interest solicitations. We even tolerate the subjugation of our legal procedures and civil rights to vague and ambiguous declarations of national security “threats.”

These are the sorts of practices that we more or less expect from our elected (or unelected) officials as a matter of course. Any squabbles we have about corrupt government practice hinge on whether or not our officials do “too much” of the above at any given time. Men may not be angels in our view, but that is a far cry from believing that men can be demons. To believe that men could be demonic would be to say that men are capable of far worse than the “routine” varieties of corruption we’ve all grown to “accept.” To entertain such a thought would be to not only consider corruption in terms of degree, but also in terms of kind–i.e. the nature of the corruption. Such a consideration would ask, “What sort of corruption is our government actually capable of?”

As you might expect, I’ve asked myself this question, many times, over many years. My answer? Our government is capable of far worse corruption than we should ever tolerate.

Naturally, many of you will not agree with my conclusion; as well you shouldn’t, at least not on the face of it. However, I do encourage you to consider one case in point that blows the whole discussion wide open. That case is the World Trade Center disaster of September 11, 2001.

Most of you probably believe that 19 Arab hijackers flew commercial airliners into the World Trade Center towers on 9/11, and as a result of the impact damage and ensuing fires, caused those buildings to crumble to the ground. This is, of course, what government entities such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the so called “independent” 9/11 Commission would have you believe. If these government bodies were made up of angels, or something slightly less than angels, you might be able to believe them. If, however, men are even more devious than Madison anticipated, believing these government bodies on their claims alone could prove to be disastrous.

There are a number of individuals and groups who have contested the government’s version of 9/11 publicly. David Ray Griffin, a former professor of philosophy and theology, has written a number of carefully worded books challenging the government’s version of 9/11 and arguing that the government was most likely involved in the crime. Most recently a consortium of scientists, including former BYU physicist Steven Jones, published a peer-reviewed article in The Open Chemical Physics Journal entitled “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe” (available free at http://www.bentham.org/open). The article states the following: “We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in significant numbers in dust associated with the World Trade Center destruction…we conclude that the red layer of the red/gray chips we have discovered in the WTC dust is active, unreacted thermitic material, incorporating nanotechnology, and is a highly energetic pyrotechnic or explosive material.”

In short, this paper argues that distinctive evidence of thermite (a type of explosive) was found in samples of dust from the Twin Towers on 9/11—something that could not have been put there by 19 hijackers flying commercial airplanes into buildings.

This paper’s findings, in my view, supports a developing body of independent research that asserts that the World Trade Center skyscrapers could not have collapsed on 9/11 because of airplane crashes alone, and identifies government entities as co-conspirators in the crime by virtue of the complexity of the crime itself, and the extent of the contradictions in the government’s cover-story—a charge that, if true, would demonstrate a significant deviation from what we generally consider “acceptable government corruption.” Since I find the case for government complicity in 9/11 extremely compelling, I argue that Madison’s critique of human nature falls short of what humans are capable of when entrusted with governmental authority—i.e., there is something very sinister about a government who conspires to destroy civilian-occupied skyscrapers under the guise of Arab terrorists.

While the details of 9/11 far exceed the scope of this opinion article, suffice it to say that there are a host of works available that outline the arguments for government complicity in the crime. Unfortunately, little attention is given to this issue in the mainstream media so if you wish to learn more about it, you must explore alternative media outlets. If you find yourself rejecting my assertion that our own government was somehow involved in the destruction of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11, ask yourself Why? If you know your government is corrupt, how do you know the limits of its corruption?

Anyone interested in more information about 9/11 should feel free to email me.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 at 20:10 and is filed under Ranger News Editorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.