Dear Mr. Hoyt,

Nathan Lee's short review of the new indie film 'The Reflecting Pool' is more of a hit-piece than anything resembling a film review.

The "review", titled, 'Trade Secrets', was published online at the NYTimes website, on the opening day of the film in NYC;
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/movies/11refl.html?_r=1&ref=movies&ore...

Lee opens with a coquettish two-step with objectivity, moving toward an acknowledgment of the film's general premise, by suggesting that the problem with the film "is not that its ideas are silly". However, halfway through the review, Lee is suddenly coy, and the film is now cobbled together from "a set of numbered, handwritten notes derived from 9/11 conspiracy Web sites, photocopied at Kinko’s and distributed at an anarchist bookshop". It would appear that Lee thinks that the ideas that drive the film are actually worse than silly.

But it's really the closing line of the first paragraph that gives the game away, as Lee resorts to the cheapest of cheap shots, hastily grabbing for the most shopworn tactic on the hit-piece shelf, "The Racist Smear";

And not just the north and south buildings but also the adjacent 7 World Trade Center, a smaller edifice, suffering much less damage, that collapsed in an identical manner but received far less coverage from — what’s the phrase I’m looking for? — oh yes: a complicit, propaganda-foisting media/industrial complex in the pocket of the Bush administration and the Jews and the oil industry!

Charming.

The thing is, the writer/director of the film, Jarek Kupsc, didn't fashion the film in such a way as to insinuate that "Jews" had anything to do with 9/11, other than including one line about the Mossad providing a warning and list of names to the U.S. intelligence community that preceded the upcoming 9/11 attacks. However, Kupsc did include a scene toward the end of the film in which a government apologist appears on a Bill O'Reilly-flavored cable show, accusing the film's protagonist, (portrayed by Kupsc), of anti-semitic behavior.

It begs the question, did Lee even watch the entire film? Or, did he just think that nobody would notice, or care? Or, like the New Yorker's Obama cartoon cover, did Lee just forget to add that ingredient so necessary for successful satire? You know the one: irony.

In an open letter to Lee and the NYTimes, director Kupsc revealed that many of his sources for the movie were mainstream reports published in the corporate press;
http://www.911blogger.com/node/16607

This reveals a broad ignorance of the basis for the film, by Lee, and when coupled with this line, "Strictly from an imaginative point of view, there is something unnerving about the weirdly elegant way the towers fell", the writer reveals a further lack of familiarity with contemporary criticism of the "weirdly elegant way the towers fell", spearheaded by a group of Architects and Engineers (including Structural Engineers) at the website AE911Truth.org.

The "review" in effect, is propaganda, stigmatizing critique of the official story of 9/11 as racist, "anarchist", or the number one category... Conspiracy Theory. It downplays the legitimacy of any research that could have been derived from an online resource, broadly painting with the CT brush, despite the fact that there is valid, verifiable information on many websites that critique 9/11. Thus, Lee is unintentionally ironic in his cry, "complicit, propaganda-foisting media/industrial complex".

In 1977, Carl Bernstein revealed how the New York Times, (and most other large media outlets in the U.S.), had been infiltrated and used by the CIA, with the secret blessings of executive-level connections. Fortunately, Bernstein's report is now available online;
http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php

In the wake of Judith Miller's WMD reporting for the NYTimes, one has to wonder if anything has really changed over the decades.

Starting way back in 1917, the U.S. government has been messing around with the flow of Truth in this country. President Wilson established the Committee on Public Information to build support for entry into WWI, spear-headed by George Creel;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Information

The NYTimes was happy to uncritically report Creel's disinformation as "news". This hidden history is recorded in testimony by William Schaap, viewable at the The King Center website;
http://www.thekingcenter.org/news/trial/Volume9.html

And also in video form on YouTube;
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=BA69081DC9C0AE84

Unlike what Lee alleges about The Reflecting Pool, the NYTimes' history as a vehicle for biased information is a matter of public record.

It's likely that Lee is as ignorant of this history as he is ignorant of the mountains of data that suggest that the Truth of 9/11 has yet to be revealed.

Back in 1968, Jim Garrison had these thoughts after appearing on the Tonight Show, "Why was it, I asked myself, that these people at the very heart of the New York media industry were so allergic to the very concept of conspiracy? What was it that was so inconceivable, that was so utterly unthinkable about the idea of a conspiracy?" (From his book, "On the Trail of the Assassins")

The question remains valid.

Sincerely,

Allan Giles
911blogger.com

cc. FAIR.org, MediaChannel.org