… by Kevin Barrett, VT Editor, for Press TV
Rome had its gladiators. The Aztecs had their epic human sacrifices. But in all the annals of bloody spectacle, nothing has ever drawn a crowd like America’s biggest annual event: The Super Bowl.
In 2011, 111 million people watched the Super Bowl, making it the most-viewed television program in US history.
American football, unlike European football, is a violent, militaristic game. The gist: Two teams of eleven muscular men in plastic armor pummel each other into oblivion as they march up and down the field capturing territory while trying to penetrate each others’ “end zone.”
The game rose with the military-industrial society it represents. American football surpassed the gentler sport of baseball as America’s national pastime during the post-World War II years of US imperial expansion.
Normally, the Super Bowl – with its ritual militarized violence and crass, tasteless, often downright perverse advertisements – represents American culture at its worst. But this year’s Super Bowl, scheduled for February 2nd, will have one redeeming feature: It will put the national spotlight on the rise of the 9/11 truth movement.
The Seattle Seahawks, who will be playing the Denver Broncos for the championship, are coached by a 9/11 truther, Pete Carroll. This fact has already begun to astonish the middlebrow world of mainstream American football audiences.
The sports blogosphere is already spilling over with outraged headlines:
“Is Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll a 9/11 Truther?”
“Report: Pete Carroll May Be 9/11 Truther”
“Pete Carroll seeks truth about 9/11 from four-star general”
“Pete Carroll, 9/11 Conspiracy Theorist”
What did Pete Carroll do to achieve such notoriety?
Last spring, Carroll grilled four-star general, Peter Chiarelli – who had just retired as the US Army’s Vice Chief of Staff – about whether 9/11 was an inside job. Carroll expressed skepticism about whether an airliner really hit the Pentagon, and apparently also remarked on the obvious controlled demolition of World Trade Center Building 7, and the only slightly less-obvious explosive demolitions of the Twin Towers: “Every 9/11 conspiracy theory you can think of, Pete asked about,” said Riki Ellison, an ex-football player turned military advocate who was present at the meeting.
Gen. Chiarelli was understandably annoyed by Carroll’s questions about 9/11. Obviously the general could not publicly deviate from the official story of 9/11 without endangering his career – and perhaps his life. So Carroll was basically forcing Chiarelli to lie. By confronting Chiarelli about the all-too-obvious 9/11 inside job – the biggest barrel of political dynamite in US history – Pete Carroll became an honorary member of We Are Change, an activist group that specializes in guerrilla video “interviews” with suspected 9/11 cover-up criminals and traitors.
What Carroll did to Chiarelli was exactly what We Are Change members repeatedly did to Rudy Giuliani when the former New York mayor was running for president. Everywhere Giuliani went, he was met by We Are Change activists with video cameras asking: “Since you have admitted that you knew in advance that the Twin Towers were going to ‘collapse,’ why didn’t you warn the firefighters?” Those brave 9/11 truth activists changed history by forcing Giuliani to drop his presidential bid. Without them, we probably would already have been led into World War III by President Giuliani.
Pete Carroll is not the only American football celebrity who has championed 9/11 truth. Another patriotic athlete, Mark Stepnowski, first spoke out for 9/11 truth in 2007.
Carroll and Stepnowski are presumably just the tip of the iceberg. It seems likely that the majority of NFL players know, or at least suspect, that 9/11 was an inside job. Though this may seem counter-intuitive, since athletes are stereotyped as being stupid and authoritarian, the reality is that NFL players have to be smart and capable of thinking for themselves to rise to the professional level.
The fact that most NFL players are African-American also contributes to the likelihood that many favor 9/11 truth. Polls have shown that roughly one-third of Americans – 36% in a well-known Scripps poll – think it likely that 9/11 was an inside job. In the African-American community, which understands the evil the US government is capable of, the figure is undoubtedly much higher.
By coming out publicly for 9/11 truth, Pete Carroll has joined some of America’s most popular celebrities: Musicians Willie Nelson, Harry Belafonte, Mos Def, Eminem, Jadakiss, Immortal Technique, Henry Rollins, and Richie Havens; actors Peter Coyote, Ed Asner, Charlie Sheen, Martin Sheen, Roseann Barr, Sharon Stone, and Michael Moore; and two of America’s most critically-acclaimed filmmakers, David Lynch and Richard Linklater, all of whom are among the thousands of notables and experts listed at PatriotsQuestion911.com.
Pete Carroll’s reputation as a fearless 9/11 truth-seeker will be the talk of many an American dinner table as Super Bowl XLVII approaches. As the blogosphere drives the topic into public consciousness, the mainstream media will be forced to cover the issue.
Carroll will be too busy preparing for the big game to allow such talk to distract him. But when more than 100 million Americans sit down to watch Coach Carroll’s Seattle Seahawks play the Denver Broncos on Sunday, February 2nd, the 9/11 truth issue will be on many minds.
Rest assured: No marching band will re-enact the controlled demolition of Building 7 during halftime. Nor will Mos Def, Eminem, Immortal Technique and Jadakiss rap “Bush knocked down the Towers” – though such a halftime show would be even more scandalously memorable than the inadequacies of Janet Jackson’s wardrobe. And if Seattle wins, don’t expect Coach Carroll to scream out on live on Fox TV: “This one’s for the truthers!”
Super Bowl XLVII will not offer a final, decisive victory for 9/11 truth. But thanks to the courage of Seattle coach Pete Carroll, it will help push this critically-important issue into the national limelight. If, some day in the not-so-distant future, the historical record is officially corrected, national policy adjusted, and a modicum of justice achieved, one of the people we will have to thank will be an unusually gutsy professional football coach named Pete Carroll.
Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist is one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror.
He is the host of TRUTH JIHAD RADIO; a hard driving weekly radio show funded by listener donations at Patreon.com and FALSE FLAG WEEKLY NEWS (FFWN); an audio-video show produced by Tony Hall, Allan Reese, and Kevin himself. FFWN is funded through FundRazr.
He also has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS, and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications.
Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin; where he ran for Congress in 2008. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, author, and talk radio host.
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