The Pentagon’s B-Movie: Looking Closely at the September 2001 Attacks

Edward Curtin

This new book by Graeme MacQueen (click here for a free e-copy) contains a collection of his articles and essays on the attacks of September 11, 2001, the subsequent anthrax attacks, and analyses of other false flag operations.  They are profoundly important and shatter the official versions of those events.

No one reading this book can come away from it not convinced that the U.S. government is a terrorist state. MacQueen’s conclusions are not based on rhetoric but on a deep empirical analyses, facts not propaganda.

With this volume, Graeme MacQueen takes his place alongside David Ray Griffin as a prophet without honor in his own time. History will declare him a hero.  To write the following introduction is a great honor, for my esteem for Graeme and his work is immense.

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Graeme MacQueen’s work is a testament to a man devoted to the search for truth and the freedom and peace that ensue from its discovery. I think it is surely not an accident that he is a Buddhist scholar and a former professor of religious and peace studies.

In this regard, he reminds me of two other inspired theologians who carry the message of love and peace into the political realm where their extraordinary writing has given great hope to those yearning for truth and justice: James W. Douglass and David Ray Griffin, the former the great JFK scholar and the latter the author of a dozen or so groundbreaking books on the events of September 11, 2001.

In this book, which is a primer on government propaganda, Graeme continues to teach how illusions must be punctured and the veil of government secrecy parted, lessons gleaned from the core of the world’s religions. That the truth will set us free is the essence of these teachings. Yet truth is a hard taskmaster and requires great courage, fortitude, and determination, which Graeme possesses in abundance, both in his person and in his writing.

Exposing the lies of the official versions of September 11, 2001, the anthrax attacks, etc. takes guts, for it causes conflict with family, friends, and authorities. It brands one a ”conspiracy theorist” who has lost his reason. In Graeme’s case this is hilarious, for you will nowhere find a writer who is less doctrinaire and who sticks more closely to evidence. In fact, I, an impetuous type, have sometimes found his approach a bit too cautious, but I have always come around to see the value in it and to trust that his conclusions are based on rigorous logic and evidence.

Sometimes a photograph can reveal a person’s soul. I think the photo of Graeme that precedes his preface, taken in 2006 when he first embarked on his writing about the official lies of September 11, 2001, truly shows his spirit. Although in his late fifties, he looks very boyish, a bit of a rake, but with the countenance of a man deeply disturbed by what he is seeing through the eidola of official propaganda. There is a trace of both sorrow and determination in his eyes. His behatted head suggests a man ready to fish for truth in the deepest depths of an ocean of lies.

As a Buddhist scholar who has long known that creative writing and speech come freely from a state of mind different from, and higher than, the normal, I think it is self-evident that his inspired writing in this book is the result of a mind clarified by the realization that the inner and outer cannot be divorced, that life and death are one, and that looking out involves looking in.

For it seems to me self-evident, that those who oppose the consensus realty of a cruel and violent social order are also trying to redeem themselves from the profound tricks the ego plays on us all, while they probe the deceptions of official propaganda. And while Graeme does not explicitly state the connections between his religious writing and research and the political analyses in this book, it is evident that his work makes manifest that “Reality” is one whole, and that the isolated individual self that separates the personal from the political has led to a badly broken world.

About a decade ago, I had the privilege of being asked to review his brilliant book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception, that forms the basis for a few of the chapters in this collection. We became great friends. And if I have yet to say anything about the content of The Pentagon’s B-Movie, it is because while it is obvious that books are written by human beings (although this is changing with AI), who those authors really are is often elided.

“Great men do not play stage tricks with the doctrines of life and death: only little men do that,” wrote John Ruskin. As a compelling exposer of official stage tricks, Graeme is great, but you would never hear it from him.

He is humble and self-deprecating in the extreme. His laugh and sense of humor is contagious, although his writing only reflects this in a sentence here or there. But I have learned that those without a sense of humor or the ability to laugh at themselves are not to be trusted. Egos block the door to truth. And even as he has battled very serious illness over recent years, Graeme’s laughter on the subject of death is to me a sign of a man pure of heart and grateful for his life in all its complexity.

The articles in this collection were written over a span of sixteen years. Divided into three sections, they intersect to form a devastating critique of multiple matters, such as the government assassinations of JFK and MLK, various false flag events, but most especially September 11, 2001 and the subsequent anthrax attacks. It is impossible to read them sequentially and not be convinced of their truths. Each in its turn, reinforces the adage that “the emperor has no clothes.” More so, by stripping away every claim of the official narratives step-by-step, we see the emperor skinless as well, a skeleton caught dead to rights with its lethal lies conclusively exposed.

In many ways, the opening chapter, “9/11: The Pentagon’s B-Movie,” a tour-de-force, serves to foreshadow many of the themes that follow, concluding with “The Triumph of the Official Narrative: How the TV Networks Hid the Twin Towers Explosive Demolition on 9/11” with co-author Ted Walter.

Graeme makes clear from the start that it is the moving images of television and film that are central to the official propaganda. This is Plato’s allegory of the cave updated where shadows on the wall are used to delude people into not seeing what obviously happened if they turned toward the light. As he writes:

This “9/11 movie” reveals itself to careful investigators as scripted, directed and produced by the U.S. national security state. The movie does not represent the real world. It violates the rules operative in the real world, including the laws of physics. Audiences will remain in thrall to the spectacle and violence of the War on Terror only as long as they remain mesmerized by the B-movie of 9/11.

But as he knows, B-movies are often popular, especially when they are of the horror genre with their ability to traumatize the viewers, even when they might suspect they are being taken for a ride. One enters a monster film with belief suspended and often leaves it forgetting it was an illusion, for the movie has penetrated deep into one’s psyche. “Only when people sense the genuine danger,” he tells us, “and leave behind fiction and special effects will they be in a position to deal with the real monster that confronts us.” This demands seeing the evil and pitiless oligarchy responsible for 9/11 as the monsters they are.

Such truth can only be distinguished from the shadows when the audience leaves the theater of the absurd, exits into the light, and snaps out of the hypnotic state. Many never do, especially because the movies are not confined to movie theaters anymore. They are integral to modern day-to-day screen life. The moving images in people’s heads often supplant reality, as Graeme makes clear:

But imagine what would happen if audiences remained convinced by the suspension of the laws of physics after they left the theatre? This, it seems to me, is what has happened with the events of September 11, 2001. Many people are still deceived by the special effects. They are still captured by the movie of 9/11.

And since the only way to exit from such horrors is mental, one often needs a wise guide. Graeme is that guide.

This book will jolt you back to reality with its concluding chapters where TV video news reports are used to show how the official narrative was quickly fashioned after initial television reports clearly showed that the buildings were blown up from within. MacQueen again [my emphasis]:

Our conclusion was that evidence-free claims, combined with repetition and a dramatic yarn, were the major mechanisms used. We also found that the evident precision and coordination demonstrate the existence of—yes, we should acknowledge it—an extremely ambitious and detailed conspiracy.

In conclusion, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how Graeme uses the concept of imagination as a probe to understand how it can be used to manipulate images by propagandists, particularly through moving images, but also how it can be used as a first step in undermining those official narratives. In this regard his castigation of leftists — Noam Chomsky Alexander Cockburn, Chris Hedges, et al. – and leftist media for their acceptance of the official lies of the JFK assassination and September 11, is significant. These people, by their overt or covert support of the government’s propaganda, have been key cogs in its success. Graeme writes:

Indeed, much of the Western left leadership and associated media not only trusted the FBI while ignoring Furtado, Chavez, the Venezuelan National Assembly and Fidel Castro; they also, through silence and ridicule, worked to prevent serious public discussion of the 9/11 controversy.

Among the U.S. left media that kept the silence, partially or wholly, are:

Monthly Review
Common Dreams
Huffington Post
Counterpunch
The Nation
The Real News
Democracy Now!
Z Magazine
The Progressive
Mother Jones
Alternet.org
MoveOn.org

Thus all these leftists, no matter what they say in their defense, bear great moral responsibility for the so-called War on Terror, the Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq, the deaths of Muslims, etc., all of which emanate from the insider attacks of September 11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks. With leftists like these, the CIA’s courting of “the compatible left” (a term coined by the CIA’s Cord Meyer), begun in the 1950s, has achieved its greatest success. The pacification of the liberal/left bourgeoise has been extremely successful and continues to the present day.

There is no need for me to tell you more about the material in this great book. Just read it. As an adjunct to Graeme’s fundamental book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception, this work tears off the veil of lies that has become the normative order for so many over the past few decades.

Whether this work frees many from the official lies or not, it is clear that Graeme has fulfilled his destiny to set us all free, if we so choose.

He pulls no punches and shows how September 11, 2001 and the anthrax attacks are an integrated inside job, serving to reinforce each other. You can ask no more of anyone.

He is an exemplar of a beautiful human being and a writer of profound importance.

This collection confirms that.

The Pentagon’s B-Movie: Looking Closely at the September 2001 Attacks, Graeme MacQueen, rat haus reality press, 15 March 2023

Edward Curtin is an independent writer whose work has appeared widely over many years. His website is edwardcurtin.com and his new book is Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.