Academic Freedom Includes the Right to Say Two Plus Two Make Four — and Substantiate It
by KBarrett
Academic Repression in the First Person
Kevin Barrett, appearing on a
local news program. University of
Wisconsin-Madison Provost Patrick
Farrell Barrett to teach, as scheduled,
a Fall 2006 class titled “Islam:
Religion and Culture” after assurances
that Barrett will encourage students
to come to their own conclusions
about 9/11, which Barrett has
called “an inside job.”
Steve Nass wants me fired from my teaching job at the University of Wisconsin, Madison because of my views on 9/11. According to Nass, “This isn’t academic freedom. This person can’t substantiate his views” (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 18, 2006).
Nass’s statement is not just false and defamatory, it is absurd, even Orwellian. Why? Because Nass refuses to even examine evidence I have proffered to substantiate my views. In my almost three years of 9/11 truth activism and scholarship, I have cited dozens of books, hundreds of articles, dozens of photos, and hours of video and audio recordings as evidence for my contention that a strong prima facie case exists that 9/11 was an inside job. (Much of this evidence is available for examination at the Scholars for 9/11 Truth website, http://st911.org.) I also served as lead editor for the scholarly book 9/11 and the American Empire: Christians, Jews and Muslims Speak Out–co-edited by one of America’s leading theologians, John Cobb, along with Jewish studies professor Sandra Lubarsky – which includes my own copiously-referenced article deconstructing the official myth of 9/11.
Rep. Steven Nass
(R-WI).
I have informed Rep. Nass about the existence of this body of evidence, and repeatedly challenged him to debate the issue. Nass has consistently refused to debate. He says he will not even so much as glance at the Scholars for 9/11 Truth website. Nass knows that Scholars for 9/11 Truth has hundreds of members, including more than 70 Ph.D.s with full university affiliations. He knows that it includes members like Morgan Reynolds, the Bush Administration’s former top Labor Department economist, who openly charges his own ex-bosses with “blowing the World Trade Center to kingdom come.” Nass must know by now that st911.org has published an immense amount of material critiquing the official account of 9/11, much of it careful, scholarly work. And yet he puts his head in the sand, refuses to even glance at the evidence, and then says the evidence must not exist because he can’t see it. So who is it who can’t – or won’t – substantiate their views?
Nass, a Bushite fundamentalist and right-wing extremist, reminds me of certain Muslims who wanted to punish Salman Rushdie for his allegedly blasphemous writings, while proudly admitting that they had never even read those writings. As a Muslim, I am embarrassed by such obscurantism. As an American and a Wisconsinite, I am ashamed to hail from the same country and state, as Rep. Nass, who has put out a fatwa on me for having politically incorrect views that he claims I do not substantiate, all the while refusing to even look at my substantiation, much less debate me on the issue.
What makes this situation poignantly absurd is that the prima facie case for 9/11 complicity is so overwhelming at every level. Virtually all of America’s major wars starting with the Mexican War of 1847 were launched by apparently fabricated incidents – a fake “Mexican attack”; an exploding Battleship Maine; a Lusitania packed with passengers and armaments and sent straight into a pack of U-Boats; a Japanese attack made inevitable by an oil blockade and allowed to “succeed” (with the critically important aircraft carriers moved safely out to sea) so that thousands of American deaths would reverse massive antiwar sentiment; a fake attack in the Gulf of Tonkin; a Kuwaiti Ambassador’s daughter coached by a Bush-linked PR firm to pose as a nurse and lie about “babies ripped from incubators.” And we know that every single member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on Operation Northwoods, a 1962 plan to trigger war with Cuba that would have mirrored 9/11 and involved U.S. military-intelligence assets murdering large numbers of Americans through “terrorist” bombings in major U.S. cities. The plan was ready to implement in about a month when JFK and MacNamara rejected it.
The circumstantial evidence also includes the Bush Administration-linked Project for a New American Century’s September 2000 call for a “New Pearl Harbor” to trigger massive military budget increases and pre-emptive wars in the Middle East. It includes the fact that the Iraq invasion was ordered back in January 2001 (Paul O’Neill), and the Afghanistan invasion was ordered and mobilized for in July 2001 (BBC). When we consider that the Patriot Act was written before 9/11, and the ultra-unconstitutional and blatantly illegal National Security Agency spying program begun several months before 9/11, we must ask ourselves how all these supposed “effects” could precede their alleged cause. (For documentation, see http://mujca.com/masterplan.htm)
Along with this circumstantial evidence, there is hard evidence showing that the 9/11 Commission’s version of events not only is baseless and in contradiction with overwhelming evidence, including its own sworn testimony from the likes of Treasury Secretary Norman Mineta, but it blatantly violates the laws of physics many times over. To take just one of dozens of examples, it is a fact, documented by photographs and eyewitness testimony, that large amounts of molten steel were produced by the WTC collapses – including the collapse of WTC-7, which was never hit by a plane. Yet the theoretical maximum temperature for hydrocarbon fires is 1800 degrees – a temperature that can only be attained under carefully controlled conditions – while the melting point of steel is 2800 degrees. Additionally, Underwriters Labs had certified the WTC steel for six hours at 2000 degrees with no significant loss of strength. The notion that jet-fuel-triggered office fires could have even weakened the WTC steel, much less caused even a bit of sagging, much less caused a slow, progressive, toppling collapse, is preposterous. The notion that these fires could have triggered an explosive straight-down collapse into tiny piles of rubble at near free-fall speed, producing pyroclastic mushroom clouds and blasting huge steel beam pieces hundreds of feet upwards and outwards, leaving none of the 47 massive core columns sticking out of the rubble, is beyond preposterous. And the idea that jet-fuel office fires could have produced the visible and audible flashes of demolition explosions (see 911 Eyewitness) as well as the testimony by dozens of New York police and firefighters and others who witnessed those explosions, is as bizarre as denying that two plus two make four.
2800 degrees minus 1800 degrees equals 1000 degrees. As George Orwell put it in 1984, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
If the fascist regime that stole the 2000 and 2004 elections, engineered the 9/11 Reichstag Fire, and launched criminal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq is not opposed and quickly dismantled by people brave enough to say “two plus two make four,” then academic freedom, along with our other Constitutionally-based freedoms, will become a thing of the past.
