When I smoked close to 40 a day, I used to avoid watching or reading anything to do with the tobacco industry, because I knew it would turn my stomach despite being “powerless” to quit buying their product.
The sage advice of my soul-mate to simply stop buying them, probably saved my life.
Duncan Bannatyne also quit by simply not buying them anymore. He’s now an extremely successful business man and angel investor, featured in one of British Television’s more intelligent ‘reality’ style TV shows, ‘The Dragon’s Den’.
Here he takes a look at British American Tobacco, the one time F1 team sponsor and marketing leviathan behind brands like Benson and Hedges, Embassy and Pall Mall – and how the increasing social taboo of smoking in Europe and North America, has forced BAT to lead an all out marketing assault on African children as young as 8, to maintain shareholder profits.
You’d be forgiven for thinking, after a quick Google of the words ‘September 11′, ‘WTC’ or ‘911′, that George Bush himself flew Tony Blair into the New York skyline, while Saddam Hussein begged him to stop.
The twisted tales which those wilfully ignorant of the truth (if it happens to contradict their concrete opinion) will spout, is so often wide of the mark, a whole industry has sprouted up around people who’s lucrative book deal claims to have ‘amazing new evidence’ that ‘911 was an inside job’ range from the intriguing ‘no debris on the pentagon lawn’ myth, to the downright comical assertion that the world trader centre was brought down by a controlled explosion and not from the impact of two fully fuelled commercial air liners.
In this documentary the BBC takes on some of the most famous of these conspiracy theories and attempts to take a closer look at the people who propagate them…
You might note that none of the people from the FDNY or the NYPD who are now active in the campaign to re-examine the evidence were interviewed about their rather more solid claims, to have seen “molten lava” running along the tracks of the subway system under the WTC, which would indicate the steel structure of the building melted at a temperature greater than that which aviation fuel can burn at and that their sworn testimony was never used in the 911 commission report.
It’s also worth mentioning that the BBC themselves are popularly sighted as complicit in the so-called cover-up because, on the day of the attacks, they broadcast a live interview with a journalist standing in front of a shot of the New York skyline, which showed WTC building #7 over her shoulder, while she reported that it had fallen down, seven minutes before it eventually did.
The BBC later apologised for using a Reuters news agency source for these claims, which was itself lifted from an affiliate local news station in New York, following completely unsubstantiated eye witness reports.
Even though WTC building #7 was never impacted by any aircraft and is clearly shown in various videos of its eventual collapse to fall in a pattern consistent with a controlled demolition, neither WTC building #7 or any questions about who actually funded the co-ordinated 911 attacks as a whole were ever investigated as part of the 911 commission report, which is largely acknowledged to have been influenced greatly in it’s final conclusions by neo-conservative policy from within the Bush White House.
