New American Dream

The New American
Dream Interview

KEVIN BARRETT [age 49], lives in Lone Rock, Wisconsin.

He is a radio talk show host.


"Kevin James Barrett is a former university lecturer and 9/11 conspiracy theorist.

"He is a member of the Scholars for 9/11 Truth and is a founding member of the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance (MUJCA), established October 30, 2004 with the stated aim of improving "interfaith dialogue, coexistence, and understanding" in light of the events of 9/11.

"Barrett first received national attention when he introduced Dr. David Ray Griffin at Griffin's lecture in April 2005, in Madison, Wisconsin to 450 people. The talk was shown on C-Span's Book TV.

"Barrett became controversial in 2006 when he held a one-semester appointment as an associate lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"In the fall of 2006, Barrett taught an introductory class called "Islam: Religion and Culture", an undergraduate course for which he had formerly been a teaching assistant since 1996. Before the semester began, he announced his plans to devote a week or two of the sixteen-week class to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack and the War on Terrorism. Controversy erupted when it became known Barrett was planning to discuss conspiracy theories in his lectures.

"An internal university probe of his performance as a teaching assistant found that "although Mr. Barrett presented a variety of viewpoints, he had not discussed his personal opinions in the classroom" and that the department-approved syllabus, which included a section on the war on terror, had been followed.

"Since leaving the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Barrett has remained in Madison as an increasingly vocal activist on 9/11 truth issues. In the 9/11 truth movement, Barrett is known for flamboyant self-promotion, frequently immoderate statements, and his inclusive "big tent" philosophy on 9/11 theories, which some researchers consider irresponsible and harmful to credibility.

"On October 22, 2007, Barrett disrupted a talk by conservative pundit David Horowitz for several minutes, causing a major disturbance.

"Barrett was driven from the hall by chants of "Asshole! Asshole! Asshole!"

"A few months later, Barrett resigned as head of MUJCA."


More on Kevin Barrett:

http://www.truthjihad.com/


_________________________

The New American Dream Trivia Question:

To win a copy of one of Palecek's books, or leftover Christmas candy, or maybe a "Deception Dollar," be the first one to correctly answer the following.

Kevin Barrett would rather be ....

a. On the radio for three hours every afternoon in every single, little shit town in America, like Rush ... and change the world in seven days b. Creaming O'Reilly in full-contact UNO c. Naming the new Ben & Jerry's flavor after Rudy Giulliani ... somehow d. Getting the liberals of Madison to get 9/11 e. Captain Cheesehead, and change the world f. Fishing in a picture perfect lake eight hours a day, and please God, make that be good enough.
__________________________


NAD: Kevin, hello, thank you for taking the time for this.

How long have you been at this, the 9/11 Truth work?

KEVIN BARRETT:
Since December, 2003. I had just finished teaching an intro to Islam class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

It was semester break, so I had time to do some research on the questions David Griffin was raising in his forthcoming masterpiece The New Pearl Harbor. I knew Griffin, had cited him in my dissertation, and respected his work. I'd heard Griffin was saying there was a strong case that the WTC was demolished with explosives and it wasn't Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon.

That sounded goofy, but after I sat down and did the research, I saw he was right: 9/11 was the most obvious botched false-flag attack since the Lavon affair. After a few sleepless nights of soul-searching, I went to work as an infowarrior. In mid-2004 I turned down a really nice post-doc from the University of California because it was founded by the Ford Foundation--the CIA propaganda outfit that has prevented Amy Goodman and lots of other pseudo-dissidents from covering 9/11.

Now, after five years of this, I'm almost $200,000 in debt, blacklisted from my chosen profession, and endlessly attacked by the army of two-bit Goebbels imitators that constitutes what's left of the mainstream US media.

Is it worth it?

To borrow a phrase from the genocidal Madeleine Albright talking about the murder of a million Iraqi children:
"Yes, I think it is worth it."

To borrow a phrase from the genocidal Madeleine Albright talking about the murder of a million Iraqi children: "Yes, I think it is worth it."

Some people think genocide is worth it, others think fighting genocide is worth a few sacrifices. I guess I'm in the latter category.



NAD: Did you ever take a day off?

KEVIN BARRETT:
Yeah. April 23rd, 2005.


NAD: You even went to the Middle East, right?

KEVIN BARRETT:
That wasn't on my day off.

In fact, it wasn't even the Middle East.

I went to Morocco (which is as far west as the UK) in May 2006. I put out a bunch of tongue-in-cheek press releases saying that since I couldn't get hired at the University, I had taken a job as a bounty hunter, and was heading for Morocco to bring back the alleged 9/11 hijacker Waleed al-Shahri "dead or alive."

Waleed al-Shahri had supposedly murdered a stewardess and flew a plane into a building, yet he turned up alive in Morocco shortly after 9/11.

In fact, he's just one of the ten accused suicide hijackers who later turned up alive.

For details, see Jay Kolar's article "What We Now Know About the 9/11 Hijackers" which was published by the leading scholarly publisher in Europe, Elsevier.

Anyway, my press release said: "Waleed, I don't know how you got out of that plane alive, but it was the last miraculous escape you'll ever make. I'm coming to get you and bring you back in handcuffs to face charges of terrorism and mass murder."

I might as well tell you the truth, Mike: Going after Waleed al-Shehri was not my only reason for taking my family to Morocco!

I lived there in 1999-2000 doing my dissertation fieldwork on a Fulbright, l and my wife's family is from there. Morocco is my academic specialty.

I love the place.

I may be moving there soon.

So it wasn't like my whole purpose of going there was just to "get Waleed."

I obviously never thought I was likely to find him.

But I did think I might be able to learn more about why he surfaced in Morocco right after 9/11 and then disappeared.

And I also thought it wouldn't hurt to get some media coverage of the fact that a bunch of supposed hijackers turned up alive after 9/11.

As it turned out, I succeeded on both counts and then some.

I got lots of media coverage in both the US and Morocco, including a story in one of Morocco's top news magazines, and I even got to meet Morocco's leading mainstream journalist covering terrorism-related issues, and hear his off-the-record doubts about whether al-Qaeda was real.

I gave a talk in Oujda that drew an overflow crowd, and sold almost 40 books — more than I've ever sold at any speaking gig in the U.S.

And I got some really interesting off-the-record interviews, including one from a high-level person with the Royal Saudi airlines, that strongly pointed toward Waleed al-Shahri being a US/Saudi intelligence asset whose cover was working for the Saudi airline (not Royal Air Maroc as the BBC Reported), who repatriated to Saudi Arabia shortly after he surfaced in Morocco.


NAD: Why? Why all that work?

KEVIN BARRETT:
I have a very simple motto: "My purpose in life is to have nothing better to do."

What could possibly be better to do than picking up a lever like 9/11 truth — the biggest lever for change ever made available to any human being in recorded history — and moving the world with it?



NAD: Will we ever get to the bottom of 9/11?

KEVIN BARRETT:
We, meaning those of us who have studied the issue, have already gotten to the bottom of it.

We don't have the names of all the culprits, nor do we know precisely what each culprit did. But we have a sufficiently detailed understanding of who did it and why to act on the basis of that understanding.


NAD: Does it matter?

KEVIN BARRETT:
Noam Chomsky doesn't think so.

Pretty much everybody else agrees that it does.

Maybe Chomsky knows something the rest of us don't.

But if he does, he sure has a hard time expressing himself clearly, considering he's supposed to be such a linguistic genius. See: http://www.barrettforcongress.us/chomsky.htm



NAD: Would you like to choose one of these to answer, elaborate on?

I don't ask this to make fun. I ask because I really seek the answers.

KEVIN BARRETT: No, I'd rather give short smart-ass answers to all of them.

- Are UFOs real?
When the propaganda industry attacks and ridicules people, it's probably because those people are onto something. What it is that the UFO researchers are onto, I have no idea.

- Did we land on the moon in 1968?
I sure didn't. Maybe you did.

Seriously, I was asleep on my parents' living room floor, so I missed it. Just think, if I had been watching that historic moment on TV like everybody else, I would be able to have an informed opinion about whether it was actually a live broadcast from the moon, or whether it was a Cold War propaganda hoax filmed in a Fuller dome in Oregon.

- Did Bush knock down the towers?
Bush himself? Not likely. They farm those jobs out to people with lower job titles and higher IQs.

- Was Paul Wellstone's death an accident?
Yeah, his plane accidentally collided with the tooth fairy.

- The Oklahoma City bombing? Wasn't that just another U.S. government terrorist exercise? Or not.
"Just another U.S. government terrorist exercise" ?! Harrumph! I'll have you know that the false-flag terrorists in the FBI and CIA worked really, REALLY hard to pull that one off, and it was at that time the biggest domestic false-flag ever!

- Waco. We burned kids, right? You can see flames shooting out of the tanks. Or not.
WE didn't burn any kids. Psychopaths working for the federal government burned those kids.

- Is Bigfoot real?
The giant bigfoots (bigfeet?) of legend are purely imaginary. However, there is in fact a dwarf variety that survives deep in the Amazon rainforest. I even wrote a song about it:

Bigfoot Midget

I’m only five foot two
Wear a thirty-four shoe
I’m a bigfoot midget
Make a hullaballoo
Out of you

There’s a forest of questions you forgot to axe
I roam through that forest making bigfoot tracks
First girl to catch me wins the prize
‘Cause I’m a little hairy guy with a big shoe size

Bigfoot midget, bigfoot midget
I’m such a bigfoot midget
I try not to step on myself

There’s the abomibidibal snowman
The loch ness monster too
They think they’re big
But I could fit
Both of them in my shoe
(Not bad for a guy who’s only five foot two...whoo-hoo) etc. etc.


- Is there a God?
Yes, but God is not all that personal.

Judaism and Christianity are incorrigibly anthropomorphic. The patriarchal version of God they often present reminds me of Blake's Nobodaddy. God does not "choose" any people over any other. Nor would God condemn the world, then allow His son to be tortured to death to redeem it. Contrary to Jewish (and most Muslim) belief, God does NOT want to whack off the tip of your pee-pee. God does NOT look like the bearded patriarch on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. If God did look like a painting on a ceiling, it would be the central pinprick of light giving birth to the exploding fractals in the Dome of the Rock. The best way to get a taste of what the word God means is not by looking, but by listening to Qur'anic recitation.


... What makes you think that?

Intuition. Experience. Meditation on the 99 names of God from the Qur'an. Or maybe I'm just a crazy conspiracy theorist, so naturally I must embrace the ultimate conspiracy.


NAD: What would you like to do after 9/11 is somehow over for you?

KEVIN BARRETT:
Tour the world performing songs like "Bigfoot Midget."

Actually, when I grow up, I want to be like you, Mike, and write a whole bunch of smart, funny novels.

Actually actually, my vocation is to educate and entertain, mainly through writing, so 9/11 is just one phase of that mission. 9/11 and related issues are the most important thing I'm in a position to write about right now.

I suppose I'll just continue writing about whatever happens to be the most important thing to write about until I can't write any more, at which point I'll stop writing.



NAD: Do you have hope in Obama? In regard to digging to get the truth about the actions of the Bush government.

KEVIN BARRETT:
I currently lean toward Tarpley's view that Obama is a synthetic "Manchurian candidate" of the same forces that did 9/11 — the anglo-american financiers who are trying to build the first truly global empire.

See John Perkins for details.

Since Obama is a creature of the 9/11 "deep perps," the chances of him breaking ranks and blowing up the whole empire project with the truth are quite remote.

It's conceivable that public pressure could force Obama and the faction behind him to allow a limited hang-out that would result in prosecution of Cheney and some of the other mid-level 9/11 perps.

"Blame the neocons, blame the Republicans, let the Soros/Brzezinski/Rockefeller/Morgan/Rothschild faction escape to continue their world takeover escapades."

Even this kind of limited hangout would be great — it would move the world toward peace, and it might get out of control and bring down the empire. Which is why it will take a lot of public pressure to push things that far.



NAD: Does your favorite coffee cup have words on it? What are they?

KEVIN BARRETT:
"God Bless The U.S.A."

Seriously.

I think my patriotic uncle Tim gave me that cup. The handle is broken, but the cup still works.



NAD: What did you absolutely have to get done by noon today?

KEVIN BARRETT:
I don't know, but it's now 11:55, so I hope it wasn't very complicated or important.


NAD: How about by Christmas 2009?

KEVIN BARRETT:
I hope to help stimulate a lot more 9/11 truth activity by Muslims, who can then give 9/11 truth DVDs and books to all their Christian friends for Christmas.


NAD: What else would you like to add? What else should we have asked?


KEVIN BARRETT:
You could have asked "why are there so many lies, slanders, and false assertions in your Wikipedia biography?"

I would have answered, "hell if I know."



NAD: If you would like — please insert a link here to something you would like linked to, with a brief tag re: where that link goes:

KEVIN BARRETT:
My new (forthcoming in a few days) website: www.truthjihad.com.

Put it wherever it will be seen, like maybe the top of the article.



NAD: Thank you.

KEVIN BARRETT:
You're welcome.