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There is an epidemic of a psychological phenomenon called cognitive dissonance in the world today. Everybody is susceptible to the reality of cognitive dissonance in one degree or another, but, to many observers, it seems to be especially prevalent in average Americans today.

Cognitive dissonance refers to the psychological or emotional discomfort felt when one is confronted with new information or a new reality that contradicts one’s deeply held beliefs or belief systems. It seems especially common among people who have been victimized by TV commercials and other methods of brain-washing and propaganda. It is also true of cult membership that is led by a charismatic, deceptive leader or membership in some other authoritarian system, including punitive parenting and religious or political indoctrination.

When there is a confrontation of conflicting and mutually exclusive beliefs, intelligent, open-minded and thoughtful people are usually willing to change their minds by re-evaluating their prior stances, looking carefully and honestly at the new evidence, reassessing the credibility of both positions and then making a decision to adopt or reject the new information, depending on the evidence before them.

Close-minded, distracted, un-informed, ignorant, too-busy, addicted or intensely conservative people may not, for a variety of reasons, have the time, inclination, intelligence or political will to look at new evidence that might run contrary to their ingrained beliefs. Therefore they may unconsciously or reflexively reject the new information, even if the evidence is overwhelmingly and provably true.

Two good examples of avoidance of unwelcome truths (and the fear of cognitive dissonance) about atrocities committed during US wars of aggression are the corporate media’s total blackballing of these taboo subjects: veterans of the Vietnam War and the Afghanistan/Iraq wars coming home to testify about the war crimes they committed overseas. (See http://www.wintersoldier.com/; http://links.org.au/node/3343; and http://www.ivaw.org/wintersoldier)

Of course the threat of being ostracized or accused of being insufficiently patriotic, traitorous or risking one’s job for telling the truth are also huge factors in covering up the Crime of the Century. The hidden message is “what is happening to Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden and what happened to JFK, RFK, MLK and Paul Wellstone might happen to you!” As Daniel Ellsberg, the famous whistle-blowing Pentagon Papers “conspiracy theorist” that leaked the painful truths about the atrocity-producing Vietnam War, said: “I have had the owners of highly-regarded media companies confide in me privately that they don’t believe the government’s version of 9/11 but are scared of discussing it publicly because they don’t want to be tarred-and-feathered for discussing “conspiracy theories”. (See http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25286)

People who freeze, faint, flee or fight when they are confronted with information that contradicts what they thought they knew are often influenced by spokespersons for authoritarian entities that have hidden agendas involving survival, greed and power. Usually such thought-leaders are financed by wealthy elites of the ruling class that have easy access to powerful propaganda machinery. One only has to look at America’s various media empires - owned and operated by excessively wealthy, politically conservative corporations - whose real interests are well hidden.

Holding conflicting ideas simultaneously is difficult or impossible for most people (except for the bribed, the ignorant, the distracted, the semiconscious, the drugged or those with an “I don’t give a damn” attitude). So the natural instinct for most humans is to make a judgment in favor of the old, deeply embedded idea. The tendency to be dismissive of the new information, even to the point of angrily labeling the new idea a “conspiracy theory” and then ridiculing the “conspiracy theorists” who have challenged them with unwelcome facts.

Not to do so may result in having to admit ones errors, which, to many people (especially Western men), can be psychologically intolerable. Another good example of cognitive dissonance and denial are certain religious fundamentalists who, while professing that the bible is inerrant, have to be in denial of the fact that there are numerous internal contradictions and inconsistencies between the Old Testament’s ethical teachings that often justifies homicidal violence and the nonviolent ethics of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount that forbids homicidal violence.

Cognitive dissonance
and 9/11 truth

The best recent example of society-wide cognitive dissonance that has placed America on the slippery slope of global conflagration, economic collapse, “Big Brother” surveillance states, endless foreign wars and domestic martial law is what has been happening ever since millions of observant, open-minded patriots saw, and then courageously said something about, what really happened on 9/11/01.

What they saw  contradicted what the 24/7 corporate  media reportage that was coming out of the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld/Rove White House and the NeoCons of the Project for the new American Century (google PNAC and 911). The disinformation was obediently echoed – and enforced - by the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon and by members of both political parties who couldn’t admit that they were destined to be part of a major conspiracy that would lead to the evisceration of the Constitution and the deaths of and disruptions to millions of innocent, unarmed men, women and children in the Middle East.

Believe your eyes and
not the lies

People who watched the events of 9/11/01 on live television or were actually present in Manhattan saw fireballs erupt near the top of both 110 story twin towers and then burn out rapidly. Most eyewitnesses didn’t see the first plane hit a tower until a day or two later when accidental coverage by some French videographers was shown on US television. President Bush had lied when he said that he had seen the first plane hitting the tower because there was no live TV coverage of that incident.

Many credible eyewitnesses (especially the scores of NYFD firefighters) saw and heard multiple explosions in multiple sites in both towers just before they exploded and were reduced to pyroclastic clouds of fine dust. There is testimonial and video evidence of widespread destruction in the bottom floors of the Twin Towers before the buildings were imploded. See: http://911blogger.com/news/2010-10-06/new-video-911-firefighters-reveal-huge-explosions-towers-collapsed

Sturdy, over-engineered steel girders up to 4 inches thick were nicely sectioned by cutter charges into easily transportable lengths before they hit the ground. Some of those multi-ton steel beam sections had been thrown, at high speed, horizontally, embedding themselves into adjacent buildings up to 600 feet away. Mayor Rudy Giuliani illegally tampered with the crime scene when he ordered the sectioned beams to be hastily shipped overseas as scrap metal to be melted down before they could be examined in the US.  

According to the testimony of hundreds of interviewees, some of the explosions originated in the basements of the towers in the minutes before the collapses and after the fireballs had burned out at the top of the towers. One eyewitness who worked in World Trade Center # 7 (later to be demolished by obvious controlled demolition at 5:20 pm - on the direct order of WTC complex owner Larry Silverstein) testified that there were explosions in # 7 before any planes hit the other two towers. That man has since died under suspicious circumstances after giving his dramatic and dissonance-inducing testimony on live TV.

Many physicists, engineers, chemists, architects, jet pilots, demolition experts, scientists, intelligence agents and others (those not co-opted or bribed by special interests) have been exhaustively evaluating the video footage of the collapses of the three towers. They have concluded that the official conspiracy theories were patently false.

Any honest viewer of even a few of the thousands of YouTube videos on the subject of 9/11 will agree with those expert observers. The scientists among them have proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that all three towers came down at accelerating free-fall speed, meaning that there was nothing structurally intact below the top of the collapsing buildings. Pulverized concrete and suddenly transected steel columns offered no resistance to the falling buildings, a reality that totally destroys the absurd pancake theory that the White House and uninformed others want gullible people to believe.

The twin towers had suddenly disintegrated an hour or so after the fires had extinguished themselves and only black, oxygen-starved smoke from low temperature office fires was coming from the buildings. No plane hit #7 and only a few insignificant, easily controllable office fires (which did not occur because of falling debris, since no windows had been broken on the involved floors) were present in that over-engineered (for sturdiness and safety) high security building. Curiously, WTC 7 contained many offices of powerful entities like the CIA, Mayor Giuliani’s emergency command center and the SEC’s (Security and Exchange Commission) files on Enron and other corrupt corporations that were heading to litigation.

Within hours of the twin towers being explosively pulverized into fine dust, the corporate media was already reporting that culprits had suddenly been identified, accused, convicted and condemned, all without a jury trial. Suddenly there were pictures on every news report of 19 young Saudi Arabian men and the terminally-ill, recent American ally Osama bin Laden (who had already been nicely demonized in the American media). The major media conveniently failed to report later that at least six of these alleged suicide bombers had been found, alive and well, in the Middle East. Go figure.

It is far too easy for the propagandists to convince us busy, distracted, over-entertained Americans to believe their lies, whether repeated by talking heads on Fox News, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, NPR, or regurgitated by normal people in the local bars, street corners or pulpits. And it’s hard to speak up when one is likely to be shouted down by a crowd of dis-informed folks whose opinions have been shaped by cunning propagandists who have had control of the megaphone.

Trying to save the soul of our
errant nation by speaking
truth to power

Most of the whistleblowers that I know are altruistic patriots who have seen the dark underbelly of their own nations and choose to overcome their cognitive dissonance and courageously speak the painful truth, risking the chance that they will be unfairly labeled “conspiracy theorists” by those that don’t know any better. They are trying to save the souls of their errant, but beloved nations.

The painful truth of the matter is this: contrary to the drumbeat we have heard over and over again about 9/11 for the last 12 years, the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld/Rove White House Conspiracy Theory about 9/11 is provably false and the proof has been available since 2001. There has been so much evidence disproving it that it is almost laughable that anybody who looks at the evidence and still believes the lies could still defend their beliefs.  9/11 is still regarded as a taboo subject in America and one of the reasons for average citizens remaining ignorant about it is cognitive dissonance, the reluctance to admit to having been fooled by the propaganda machine. The ability to accept the humiliation of being conned into believing a falsehood is not a common trait among Americans.

Many American may not care enough and perhaps are too distracted, too busy or too addicted (to brain-altering drugs, entertainment, videogaming, food, sports, religion, etc) to take the time to do their own research and to double-check the veracity of what has been proven over and over again about the WTC towers: they were demolished by unknown insiders who pre-planted the explosives and not by foreigners. That is both important and tragic, for 9/11 is the Crime and Cover-up of the Century. It is the most serious issue of our day, the cause of massive death, destruction and wars and one that is deciding the increasingly dismal future that may not be able to sustain a healthy living environment for those who are following us.

To continue to ignore the truths uncovered by the multitudes of thoughtful, highly intelligent and courageous prophetic voices world-wide and to continue to believe the absurd official theories when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary is to helplessly go along with the evil agenda of shadowy, exploitive, psychopathic powers that are not your friends; nor are they the friends of your children, your nation or the earth. To continue to be oblivious about the Crime and Cover-up of the Century will be putting our children and their planet in peril.

For more information, please start your research here:
(check out these very informative websites that reveal the truth about 9/11, including Dr James Fetzer’s Scholars for 9/11 Truth at http://911scholars.org/, Richard Gage’s Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth at: http://www.ae911truth.org/ or Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice at www.http://stj911.org/.