It was the Canadian Left at its absolute insensitive and appalling worst. On the eve of the 9/11 remembrance ceremonies, the leftist, anti-Bush Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CanadaÂ’s national public broadcaster, aired an outrageous and disgraceful documentary on a Sunday news program regarding half-baked 9/11 conspiracy theories that only served to insult the memories of those who perished that tragic day.
Titled 9/11: Truth, Lies and Conspiracy, the only fascinating thing about the CBC show was its complete absurdity and the fact that it actually made it to air.
On the conspiracy side, it featured a young, budding “film-maker” whose online documentary portrays the destruction of the World Trade Center towers as the result of a bomb in the basement, demolition explosives planted beforehand throughout the buildings, and the airliner crash, which, it claims, was not enough in itself to topple the towers. According to this masterpiece of misleading fiction, the Pentagon was also hit by a missile, not by an airplane; and the passengers of United 93 didn’t crash into a Pennsylvania field, but disembarked at an airport.
This is a widely downloaded internet conspiracy film that is being translated into different languages. The CBC swallowed it whole.
Giving his reason for making his documentary, the rather inarticulate 20-something director told the CBC interviewer: “Uh, well, the original project started out what was supposed to be basically just me getting into film-making.” Which is really all one needs to know about this film. Oh, and by the way, the budding Michael Moore also subscribes to the theory that the US government made 9/11 happen and didn’t just allow it to take place, as some other conspiracy wackos believe. I guess that’s known as taking a principled stance in their warped world.
David Ray Griffin, who lost a child on 9/11, was the other conspiracy theorist on the CBC program. Griffin, a theologian, has written a book expounding his views which are somewhat similar to those of the film-maker. Lee Hamilton, the 9/11 Commission co-chair and author of his own book on the 9/11 tragedy represented the showÂ’s anti-conspiracy side along with Jim Meigs, editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics, which also published a book refuting the 9/11 conspiracy myths.
One Canadian viewer, Toronto Sun columnist Joe Warmington, who covered 9/11 and the War on Terror, said he was incredulous when he watched the show.
“I thought it was doing a fictional story picked up on the internet and legitimizing the conspiracies,” he said. “It’s like the guy who caught the 300-pound bass and they put the doctored photo on the internet. The network picks up the story and asks whether it could be true. You don’t cover a story like that. It is basically the internet swallowing a network. They were giving legitimacy to a kid who is basically a wannabe film-maker.”
The leftist CBCÂ’s reasons for allowing this travesty of journalism to be broadcast to a countrywide audience are probably several. Perhaps first and foremost, the innate anti-Americanism of CBCers, like the anti-Bush attitude of CBS journalists involved in the Dan Rather scandal, causes these America haters to lose journalistic perspective. As well, the anti-Bush position of the two conspiracy theorists matches the CBCÂ’s anti-American agenda. Many such theorists believe 9/11 was government engineered, so the Republicans would have a pretext to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. And while the CBC may not go along with this theory, it will give a nudge and a wink to it, since it is against the Bush administrationÂ’s foreign policy.
An example of this nudge and wink on the show, Warmington said, concerned the use of cell phones on United 93. The conspiracy theorists said the phones wouldnÂ’t work at 30,000 feet and thus no calls were ever made. The CBC interviewer attempted to back up their claim by saying his cell phone didnÂ’t work at 35,000 feet.
“It was a feeble attempt to lend credibility to a charge that he has no way of verifying,” said Warmington. “This kind of thing wouldn’t get by a college journalism professor to freshman students on their first day.”
The frat boy film-maker also rarely mentioned bin Laden or their accomplices, or examined their culpability for 9/11 or for the attacks on the USS Cole or the American embassies in Africa.
“When the so-called film-maker suggests that airplanes and the passengers on it vanished harmlessly into thin air is when a real news organization would walk away,” said Warmington. “To me, it is just as ugly as the fabrications about President Bush’s National Guard record that cost Dan Rather and others their careers. The National Enquirer would not even have run this.”
In the long term, the CBC production is helping to build the kind of bridgehead one sees concerning Pearl Harbor. Regarding that historical catastrophe, conspiracy theorists believe President Roosevelt knew about the impending Japanese attack and did nothing to prevent it in order to get the United States involved in the Second World War. The same is now being said about President Bush regarding 9/11 and the current War on Terror. If such internet drivel makes it on a major network, fifty years from now, this twisted version of events could become history.
And it is a rapidly expanding bridgehead. Sadly, a recent poll on another Canadian television network showed that 22 per cent of Canadians believe the American government was involved in 9/11. Another 53 per cent are of the opinion that US foreign policy was responsible for the attack. All of which shows a diminishment of trust in American government, especially Republican government, another leftist goal.
“It’s amazing to me how the Left seem to like bin Laden and other terrorist leaders better than their own president,” said Warmington. “It’s hard to win a war when you’re being eaten from the inside like that. But they better be careful. They may like fiction, but one day it may come back to bite them.”
At the moment, however, it is a CBC Radio reporter who got bitten by the broadcaster’s anti-Bush stance. Christine St. Pierre, a French-language reporter, was suspended after writing an open letter in support of Canadian troops fighting in Afghanistan. CBC employees, it seems, are not allowed to voice opinions on “controversial” issues.
And as for the timing of last SundayÂ’s CBC program, broadcast when the world was set to mourn the tragic loss of human life that day, Warmington perhaps sums up best the feelings of many of his fellow Canadians:
“To do this on the anniversary of the death of 3,000 people is the most repugnant thing one can do. Talk about desecrating a grave. What’s next? Are they going to try to prove that Elvis is still alive or that Jimmy Hoffa is working in a doughnut shop in New Jersey?