TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS

Sunday, October 15, 2006

(Total911.info) -- Phillip Zelikow, Executive Director of the 9/11 Whitewash Commision, made a bald admission in a 2004 interview. From University of Virginia Alumni News, Winter 2004:


"The witnesses all had their own truths. . .. People who eventually will go through our archives will find all kinds of divergent accounts and differences in tone. One of the things that that will be hardest for historians later to recapture when they go back through the archives is to figure out exactly how we pieced some of these together, because they'll hear all these jarring and outlying accounts and see so many odd documents.
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This essentially is an admission by Zelikow that the narrative produced by the commission has little relationship to the information contained in the underlying documents, which the Commission classified as secret for several decades.

This should be unsurprising to anyone who has read the Wikipedia entry for Zelikow. Drawing from an earlier UVa publication, the Winter 1999 edition of the Miller Center Report [PDF], we learn that Zelikow's expertise is in something called "public myths." From Wikipedia, via www.ST911.org:

"Prof. Zelikow's area of academic expertise is the creation and maintenance of, in his words, "public myths" or "public presumptions," which he defines as "beliefs (1) thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community." In his academic work and elsewhere he has taken a special interest in what he has called "'searing' or 'molding' events [that] take on 'transcendent' importance and, therefore, retain their power even as the experiencing generation passes from the scene. In the United States, beliefs about the formation of the nation and the Constitution remain powerful today, as do beliefs about slavery and the Civil War. World War II, Vietnam, and the civil rights struggle are more recent examples." He has noted that "a history’s narrative power is typically linked to how readers relate to the actions of individuals in the history; if readers cannot make a connection to their own lives, then a history may fail to engage them at all" ("Thinking about Political History," Miller Center Report [Winter 1999], pp. 5-7).
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Scans of the entire UVa Alumni News interview are available in a Total911.info web exclusive, at this link.

| Posted at 12:31 | PERMA-LINK |

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