Orwell's Optimism

The Deep State, Self-Deception, 9/11, and the Legend of
"FBI Maverick" John O'Neill

Essay by Allan Weisbecker

Design by D.L.

Orwell's Optimism: The Deep State, Self-Deception, 9/11, and the Legend of "FBI Maverick" John O'Neill

As with all great storytellers, what you have to love about George Orwell is his grasp of what makes people tick. Although Nineteen Eighty-Four’s ‘predictions’ about how a future dystopian world might look were ‘inaccurate’ in many ways (that the world power-structure would consist of three ‘super states’ being the root miscalculation), his treatment of protagonist Winston Smith’s inner life for me is scary in its veracity. Winston’s profound sense of isolation, his very doubting his own sanity, and indeed, his ruminations on the nature of ‘truth’ and ‘reality,’ should ring familiar to any of us

Orwell’s answers to the truth question are accepted with all due sympathy for Winston’s plight by the armchair reader; this is germane to Orwell’s art. Yet this same reader, a literate, intelligent buddy, say, who might (does) live down the street will listen to one’s empirical ponderings about how Building 7 came down with a shifty, uncomfortable look that belies his purported belief in Orwell’s themes regarding human reason, and even the notion that with the freedom to say two plus two equals four, all else follows.

Orwell's doublethink contains within itself the ultimate catch-22: the referred to buddy might read my above paragraph and protest ‘That’s different!’, meaning that the subject of 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ it engendered has nothing to do with Orwell’s insights. And, vitally: denial, let alone doublethink, is most certainly not relevant to him.

Brute intelligence and highfalutin intellect has nothing to do with immunity to Orwell’s brand of uber-denial. Christopher Hitchens writes a book boldly titled Why Orwell Matters, then he himself swallows with the fanaticism of the newly converted the whole ‘war on terror’ hoax ( let alone the 9/11 official myth.

How could this be? Here’s a hint: in his book’s informing us of the sage Orwell’s learned importance regarding world affairs, Hitchens somehow skips Orwell’s view on the most important aspect of world affairs, i.e., war itself, a view that is as valid and verifiable as the physics of collapsing skyscrapers.

Listen to a little audio montage of Orwell’s thoughts on war, what it is, what it means, why it is waged. (It takes only a minimal leap of logic to understand Orwell’s thoughts on war to also apply to the current economic meltdown, which, like war, is designed to keep the masses distracted, dispossessed, and ignorant, and hence accepting of the ruling hierarchy, and the tyranny of its world-agenda.)

‘It does not matter whether the war is actually happening... all that is needed is that a state of war should exist.’

To those who doubt the depth of Orwell’s wisdom, I suggest a reading of The Report From Iron Mountain, a think tank analysis of war – or, rather, the unacceptable economic/social conditions that would accompany peace -- commissioned just as JFK was outraging the very Military Industrial Complex Ike warned of by committing to a real world peace. (Please, spare me the ‘it was written for a laugh’ Wikipedia misdirection. Iron Mountain is in fact a perfect conjunction between Orwell’s prescience and today’s headlines.)

Nowhere in his final masterwork does Orwell in the least bit accept the ruling elite’s stated rationale for waging war. War, he writes, is an ‘imposture.’ As Orwell composed this evaluation of the most important subject of our times, his life was nearing its end, and he knew it. I think it safe to assume: Based on his life experience, this is how George Orwell perceived war.

Again: Nowhere in Why Orwell Matters does Hitchens deal with his intellectual idol’s virtual deathbed summation of man’s most meaningful if annihilative enterprise.

How do you figure? I mean, if Hitchens disagrees with Orwell on the meaning/purpose of war (which he obviously does), fine, but I would submit he should have therefore changed his title, if just slightly, possibly to something like Why Orwell Doesn’t Matter.

But to just... fail to mention it...

Again, How do you figure?

What jumps out at us is Hitchens’s referral to the Saddam Hussein regime as being the ‘Orwellian’ element in the Iraq fray -- not even bothering to acknowledge the Bush-Cheney WMD prevarications, which would have made The Ministry of Truth’s Winston Smith blush in the (re)writing thereof -- raising ‘Orwellian irony’ to a hithertofore unscaled peak, IMHO.

Listening to Hitchens pontificate on the Iraq war, it is obvious that he actually believes that the U.S. invasion and occupation has something to do with democracy-spreading , which begs the question: With whom does Hitchens really identify (in Nineteen Eighty-Four), the introspectively beleaguered Winston or the Inner Party acolyte/torturer, O’Brien?

Predictably for a ‘major intellect’ so mired in doublethink that shooting himself in the foot sounds like fun, Hitchens himself brings up the subject of Orwell’s possible view of the Iraq war, were he around today, somehow (again) ‘forgetting’ that, according to O., the real war-motive has nothing to do with the State’s stated one, which in the case of Iraq is already a multi-layered lie: before the ‘spreading democracy’ lie came that other lie, the WMD one, which, according to O, was itself still another lie, since the real root motive of waging war is as above, i.e., the furtherance of the home-ruling regime’s agenda.

And, of course, the stacks of mendacity I have outlined were themselves begat by the mother of them all, the 9/11 Lie, which to countenance (as Hitchens does) requires still another stratum of incomprehension of Orwell’s tenets.

Regarding Hitchens on war/Orwell, one is somehow reminded of the renowned physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who, when confronted by a non-scientific theory, would label it ‘Not even wrong.’

And this is a guy who considers himself, above all, to be ‘the smartest man in the room.’ Or in any room.

Orwell himself would perhaps nod and sigh at Hitchens’s myopic claptrap, for inherent in his tale’s schema is the seemingly counter-intuitive premise that it’s the Inner Party, i.e., Hitchens’s ‘smartest man in the room’, that is the most fanatical in terms of dumb-brute orthodoxy, and is the most subject to the deepest layers of doublethink. Apparently, the ‘smarter’ you are, the more tortuous/ingenious are your paths to self-deception.

But we need more examples of why Orwell really does matter! Unfortunately, throw a rock in the general direction of the American Intelligentsia and watch it ricochet around; after caroming off Hitchens’s high forehead it’ll probably hit ten more of the bastids:

Noam Chomsky. A name that for me used to epitomize clarity of thought and, above all, suspicion of ‘common knowledge’ or ‘the prevailing wisdom’ of this or any other day. How does one even comprehend his views on the JFK assassination and 9/11 , given his authorship of Manufacturing Consent, a near perfect presage for exploring the MSM’s collusion in both crimes?

Howard Zinn. Here we have another darling of the Left, and a man you sense was a decent human being (R.I.P.). This historian, theoretically of the finest kind, in response to a Truther’s query of Who did 9/11?, shoots back, ‘ Who cares? It’s in the past!’

(In the long version of this essay I postulate that for a ‘journalist’ to not see and espouse the truth behind 9/11 and the War on Terror, he/she must either be delusional – in the Orwellian/doublethink sense – or be coopted, i.e., be some sort of conscious agent of the deep state.)

What sort of insanity is this? Cooption or delusion? Sadly, the latter, no doubt, with both Chomsky and Zinn. (Truly, it’s less scary that these major intellects would be coopted – somehow threatened or blackmailed by the deep state, say – rather than be afflicted with the level of insanity evidenced in these clips. I do not lightly label them insane; but what else does one call it?)

In the Chomsky/Zinn structuralist view, ‘conspiracies’ are unimportant, even nonexistent, as is the evil (or the good) that individual human beings might further: World events are shaped by the mindless machine of power politics, not the evil of power-mad humans. But my point being: Denial truly becomes doublethink when one’s lifelong view of how the world works is at stake.

‘... and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety.’

Oh, and speaking of dispiriting catch-22s: Returning to Hitchens, it is not only the surface inconsistencies that defy logic – his acceptance at face value of the ‘war on terror,’ say – but more pernicious is the ‘scholarly’ notion that as long as we ‘freely’ cerebrate upon Orwell’s warnings (even making them required reading for formative young minds), we’ll be okay!

(If you consider it cruel to ‘abuse’ a man as ill as Hitchens apparently is, fear not: a la George O, he’ll not even understand my slings, let alone be upset by them. Of that you can be utterly assured.)

But more examples! As I say, toss a rock...

What should we make of David Goodman (plus Sis Amy) in the above doozey from good ol’ Book TV? Cooption or delusion? Although there is no reason to take the question as either/or, we still might ask ourselves, Was David Goodman lying when he claimed he didn’t know why Building 7 coverage has been censored by both the mainstream and so-called ‘progressive’ media (including his sister Amy’s Democracy Now!).

In other words, denial/doublethink or deceit? (The latter being indirect evidence of cooption.)

I take this distinction seriously and have studied it; my instinct, especially given a lack of outright evidence of cooption, is to lean towards Orwell’s version of denial-on-steroids. But in this case, on Book TV’s ‘Spinning the Message Panel’ – and I ask you to study David Goodman as he spouts his crapola to see if you agree – I’m fairly sure that the guy is simply a lying sack of dung.

In other words, cooption. Ditto – especially – Sis Amy. One need only to look into how much funding Democracy Now! gets from the Ford Foundation and other deep state fronts to understand the motive.

These types, much more so than those of the Chomsky/Zinn doublethink-ridden delusional brand, piss me off. (Chomsky/Zinn give me the creeps.)

And please don’t go on about how much the Goodmans have done for the Timorese and so forth. I am on a different subject here, which can be summed thus: The way to judge a human’s capacity for self-reflection (doublethink and self-reflection being mutually exclusive) is to see if they do the right thing when it’s against their self-interest to do so. This is how you know – the only way to know – who someone really is. It’s in the Goodmans’ self interest to expose the sorts of deep state peccadillos they do; but 9/11 Truth would cost them money...

What makes the Goodmans (especially Amy) so destructive to the (already) faint hope that civilization as we know it will survive, is that well-meaning folks tend to think that with watchdogs like them looking out for us, all is well.

All is not well.

As mentioned above, cooption and delusion (ego-denial-hypocrisy, denial/doublethink, cognitive dissonance, different terms, basically the same notion) are not mutually exclusive; far from it. For example, let’s imagine brother and sister David and Amy watching one of the many excellent ‘citizen journalist’ documentaries on 9/11; one of the Loose Change flicks or a David Ray Griffin lecture (or Barry Zwicker's seminal The Great Conspiracy). Just the two of them; they uncork a bottle of dry red and slip in a DVD or call it up on Youtube...

Wait. They would never do that; never sit and watch a 9/11 film. So how would it work? Let’s use our imagination...

Here’s a thought ...

So imagine it’s just the two of them, post viewing; no reason to dodge questions or lie like slugs as they have to do in public. How does the conversation go after witnessing beyond a reasonable doubt proof that they’ve buried (‘censored’) the most important story of their lifetimes, and are after-the-fact colluders in mass murder?

It’s in this sort of situation, I would submit, that doublethink really kicks in....

You know what? Enough said. I actually don’t want to imagine those two doing anything, such is my contempt. If you don’t get the drift, screw it, I’ll repeat myself: check this out.

But truly, it was Orwell’s genius that he so profoundly understood – decades prior to the present day’s simultaneously refined yet sledge-hammering propaganda machine – that which is for me the most remarkable yet least acknowledged trait of the human species, i.e., the capacity for self-deception so eloquently and powerfully defined when Winston Smith’s mind ‘...slipped into the labyrinthine world of doublethink.’

Yes, think of it: A species so self-aware and clever that (notwithstanding Alex Jones’s take on evolution as a ‘fraud’) it fathoms not only the mechanism of its own physical inception over the eons, but the very genesis of the cosmos... yet in the matter of exploding skyscrapers it is capable of blithely ignoring the authenticity of its own senses.

Speaking of the authenticity of our own senses, you may have noticed that Michael Isikoff was on the ‘Spinning of the Message’ panel. Let’s see how it goes with him, and the authenticity of his senses.

Trust me: Had you had Isikoff hooked up to a polygraph when he claimed to have ‘seen the wreckage,’ the needle wouldn’t have budged. The prize-winning journalist wasn’t lying. He was ‘doublethinking,’ rewriting his own history, to fit with his view of how the world works...

But the best is yet to come with Isikoff ...

If you think I had to hunt the C-Span archives far and wide to come up with material for my little ‘doublethink’ films, think again. In fact, in the feature-length documentary I’m making, in order to keep it under two hours and still have room for my ‘citizen’ interviews (plus surfing, guy and his dog, and south-of-the-boarder road stuff), I will not be able to work in the above Goodman material, fun though it is; I have archived about a terabyte of Flaming Orwellian Media Figures Hypocrisy to choose from. (With a couple or so exceptions – which are obvious -- the films here are not how they will be presented in Water Time; I ‘threw these together’ for this essay.)

A bit about my film, titled Water Time; Surf Travel Diary of a MadMan, which bears upon the same general subject as this essay (I’ve been working on for over three years): Of my three-score in-depth interviewees, none of them believed that 9/11 was an inside job, and none had seen footage of Building 7 coming down. (They were all folks I ran across on the road and in the surf in Mexico and Central America)

Guess what, and shame on you (for not paying attention) if you’re surprised: Not a one of them changed his/her mind about 9/11 based on a thorough analysis of the physics of 7’s disintegration. What’s remarkable about these folks, and what they have in common, is the tortuousness of their ‘reasoning’ in keeping to their 9/11 official story belief.

Check out the first guy in this little clip ...

In a way, this first fellow, in his musings about mind-change (after seeing 7 fall), sums up the whole Orwellian problem of new information-processing.

The second guy in the clip, the older fellow, is interesting in that he is a retired state department terrorism expert. (He put up with my five hours of on-camera grilling because he happened to be a fan of one of my books.) After describing his own military intelligence background and his training in demolition and engineering and bombing techniques, he watched (for the first time) Building 7 come down and suddenly claimed architectural/engineering ignorance (‘did they use dry wall or...’), further supposing that the explosions so many people heard were ‘fire extinguishers blowing up.’

It’s amazing the sorts of people you run into wandering around on a Latin America surf trip. In fact, one guy... hell, it’s worth a few minutes, given that the interviewee is a ‘big fan of Orwell’.

My point, though, is to hammer home the real problem, which, clearly, is us, or, rather, is built into us on a level more profound than imagined in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell, were he ‘around today,’ would likely do some further self-reflecting and realize his over all miscalculation: His excessive optimism regarding human nature.

Consider: Orwell’s storytelling premise was that for the masses to accept blatant disregard for ‘the product of their own senses’ there had to be ‘jackboots on human faces,’ i.e., a radically totalitarian police state. Clearly (as I’ve tried to show here) the jackboots are unnecessary. Indeed, turn on the news or pick up a newspaper or scan Book TV’s archives, you’ll find folks living in worlds of delusion that might’ve raised O’s brow; and consider that today’s history is rewritten virtually in real time – on ‘Orwellian’ levels -- with hardly a yelp of objection, except from the odd internet nutcase.

Consider: Nick Rosen ‘knows’ (via Larry ‘let’s pull it’ Silverstein himself!) that Building 7 was indeed a controlled demolition while also ‘knowing’ that the official story must be true. Where is the jackboot/intimidation as he ‘simultaneously holds two opinions... knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both’ (and doing so while ‘being a big fan of Orwell’!).

Or, if you still don’t get it, listen to my terrorism-expert chum locate ‘our enemy’ in the ‘war on terror.’

No jackboot on his face either, yet he can’t see the War on Terror for what it is .

Imagine that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor… and then waited a decade (and counting) before making their next move… that’s what they’re asking us to believe…

That something like 200 million of my fellow citizens accept the Emperor’s-New-Clothes lunacy of the 9/11 official story (and the ‘war on terror’) with no co-option factor (nothing ‘in it for them’ to believe) is disconcerting in the extreme, to be sure. But what pushes me to personal identification with Winston Smith is the contemplation of a theoretically real journalist, like, say, Greg Palast, another buyer of the official story (al Qaeda did it). Likewise, with Palast cooption is not a real possibility, given that he exposed two presidential election thefts (2000, 2004). These are revelations that coopted journalists almost by definition would not touch; they are arguably as indicative of deep state power/subterfuge/evil (the very subversion of our democracy) as 9/11 itself.

So with Greg it’s pure doublethink/delusion. In his own way... I mean... given that current events/recent history is his life, Greg Palast is... there’s no better word... insane.

Isn’t he?

As usual I get visual and specific in driving myself nuts: I imagine Palast watching Building 7 coming down, asking myself, How does this brilliant, truth-obsessed journalist come to the conclusion that drapes and desks burning did that? (It’s here that another movie allusion comes to mind: The classic sci-fi film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, when the protagonist suddenly realizes that his next door neighbor has been replaced by a pod-replicate wherein ‘the lights are on but nobody’s home.’)

Truly, what’s going on here?

In fact, being such a fan and admirer of Palast, I went further than whimsical movie imagery. Having received a Palast plea-for-financial-help email (I’m on his list), I responded with a 9/11-related query that – along with my Building 7 imagery – had been bugging me.

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In Palast’s book Armed Madhouse, Greg makes the claim that the bin Laden ‘Confession Tape,’ ‘found’ by the CIA in a house in Afghanistan just after 9/11, is genuine. Greg states emphatically that ‘It really is bin Laden’ on the tape. (To admit that it’s planted, i.e., false, evidence is to in effect admit that 9/11 was an inside job.)

Greg says the guy on the right is bin Laden. What do you say?

So I wrote him back offering the requested $150 for one sentence from him explaining his ‘source’ for this assertion.

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No response.

So I sent a reminder of my offer.

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Nope. Bottom line: Palast didn’t respond to my offer because he in fact has no legitimate excuse for claiming ‘... it really is bin Laden’ on the tape, the simple reason being that it is not bin Laden on the tape. This according to experts... or, of course, anyone with eyes.

I gave him the option of just admitting he had no source. All I asked was a quick return email, ten seconds of effort; I would have sent him the $150. Considering the desperate tenor of his email, why didn’t he do it?

Because $150 was not worth exposing his own denial/doublethink to himself. (Why should he care about what I think?)
Anyway, as per usual, I aggravated my own sensibilities by picturing Palast reading my email, trying to imagine his facial expression and what it meant, in terms of what was going on inside HIS GODDAMN HEAD!!!

Two Bobs…

For a ‘journalist’s journalist’ like Palast to make a patently untruthful claim – one of momentous implications – and refuse to acknowledge that he had no source may seem an aberration; or so we perhaps should assume.

But take Bob Parry, author of Lost History; The Contras, Cocaine, the Press, and ‘Project Truth’. As with Palast, Parry has broken big stories; in fact, Lost History is one of the biggest of the big, at least of the 1980s. And as with Palast, Parry has suffered de facto ostracism from the MSM for his dogged allegiance to the truth.

Lost History is up there with Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance series, which won Webb a Pulitzer (and also got him killed – excuse me, uhh, got him ‘suicided’.) Both books deal with CIA antics in Central America during the 1980s. As with Webb’s book, Parry blows the whistle on the CIA’s direct involvement in cocaine trafficking in order to fund the Contras.

Below is an email I wrote to Parry back in November of 2010. I was comparing his Lost History (LH) to Bob Woodward’s Veil; The Secret Wars of the CIA.

Listen: In Veil, Woodward does not mention CIA involvement in cocaine trafficking to fund the Contras. Given that the Contra war in Nicaragua was the most important of all it’s ‘secret wars’ of the 1980s, what we have here is a lie by omission of… well, excuse me, but of Orwellian proportions.

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The above email serves partially to include Bob Woodward in this essay – he is, in my view, the archetype Deep State asset, the mother of them all. But its main function regards Bob Parry: Parry and I exchanged further emails, Parry basically letting Woodward off the hook as an ‘intelligence asset’ (his phraseology). (For those interested in Woodward’s likely fate -- according to me -- of ‘rotting in Writer Hell’, see my LewRockewell.com essay.)

What happened more recently is my point. I got a Palast-esque plea-for-donation email from Parry’s site, Consortiumnews.com. Same basic thing: He needs money to keep his operation going.

Shortly thereafter, Parry wrote a Consortiumnews.com piece about the 9/11 Truth Movement. It stunned me in its blatant disinformation and two-bit ad hominem crapola.

Since you’re here and still reading, odds are that the following needs no rebuttal:

For instance, the “truthers” have long claimed that the collapse of Building Seven is the prima facie case for their conspiracy theory, especially, they say, its drop at near freefall speed. However, the speed of the collapse should not be all that surprising because Building Seven had a large atrium. Once the atrium’s supports were breached by the shock of the Twin Tower collapse and a resulting fire, Building Seven would logically fall into the open space at near freefall speed.

In the interest of getting on with it: The above physics-defying utter garbage was written by a real journalist; as with Palast, in no way can I picture Parry as a Deep State asset (not ex officio). More crapola:

On other points, the “truthers” have simply stretched the truth. For example, one “truther” claim was that they had discovered a residue of explosive thermite in the World Trade Center wreckage. However, when I checked their source, I saw that the claim was actually that the residue was consistent with thermite, not that it was thermite.

Note the ‘However, when I checked their source…’ prelude to the claim that the ‘residue’ was only ‘consistent’ with thermite. Really, Bob? When I checked the source, I found this, from the rigorously peer reviewed paper by a bevy of respected international scientists:

Numerous iron-rich spheres are clearly observed in the residue following the ignition of these peculiar red/gray chips. The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic [my emphasis] material and highly energetic.

In other words, the scientists not only found ‘residue consistent with thermite,’ they found unexploded thermite. Not only that, but when they ‘lit it’, it went ‘boom’! This is quite literally akin to finding the defendant’s DNA-matched sperm in a rape victim.

Question: Was Bob Parry actively lying when he wrote ‘…when I checked their source’?

Or was he merely failing miserably, completely, at his job?

But my real point yet looms. In respect for Bob Parry’s past dedication to truth and to his past fearlessness and rigor in pursuing it, I emailed Parry the following:

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As with Grag Palast, No response, in this case to my offer of clipping a $100 bill to a DVD, with a one sentence email his only obligation.

Again, here’s my interest: As Bob Parry read my email (remember, we’d corresponded as ‘colleagues’), and as he made the decision to not respond, WHAT WAS GOING ON IN HIS GODDAMN HEAD?!!

Sorry for shouting, but this stuff really does bug me. So much so, in fact, that I’ve been looking into the possibility that we’ve been subjected to some sort of CIA/NSA/DIA/(etc.) mass mind control black psyop: Imagine an MK-ULTRA/COINTELPRO hybrid with some HAARP pizzazz and maybe a bit of EMR (Electromagnetic Frequency Research) thrown in on the side...

In fact, thinking back to good old Book TV’s Spinning the Message Panel, it occurs to me that not only is this possibility not absurd, but to think that something like it is not going on – or at least being actively studied -- is downright naïve...

So yes, as Christopher Hitchens figures – but not for the reasons he figures – Orwell most certainly does matter, notwithstanding his likely bewilderment ‘were he around today’ at his own enduring acclaim (pundits announcing that solemn discussions of Orwell will stave off his dire prognostications), while the Department of Homeland Security’s Big Sis Napolitano directs us to ‘report suspicious activity’ by our fellow Walmart Shoppers from some 9,000 (so far) country-wide ‘telescreens.’ (It’s now to the point where amongst those who terms themselves ‘awake’ it’s becoming a tiresome cliché to point out ‘Orwellian’ aspects of our daily lives, while our ‘less-conscious’ chums label us nutcases for bringing it up at all. Still again: How do you figure?)

What level of angst might it have caused Orwell to know that more than half a century after his passing his world view would be studied and lauded, even books written in homage to it by the smartest of men -- who see no irony in their own patriotic fervor, somehow oblivious to how their own state’s name could well be substituted into Orwell’s ‘Oceania was at war with Eurasia, therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia’ aphorism?

But perhaps I myself suffer from excess optimism -- at my assumption that Orwell would be above his own malaise. Although, thankfully, George has so far been absent from my nocturnal travels, I can certainly picture the following, after a second Ambien kicks in:

A steely-eyed bouncer bars me at the door. The Chestnut Tree Café is closed to the public for a private party. I peek through the front window to see that place is packed with the gang of literati and celebs berated in this essay, plus a slew that didn’t make the final edit (of the coopted crew, most notably Bob Woodward, hoisting a brew at a table of delusional doublethinkers from Rolling Stone).

I now notice that the Chestnut Tree has been renovated, expanded to the size of... by god it’s goes on and on, as voluminous as the L.A. Coliseum, SRO, all ‘journalists.’ (Could that be my old editor from Penguin Putnam by the bar, her back to me?) My head begins to spin as The Big O himself rises to the dais; over the applause he begins by thanking everyone for their vision and support...

By the way, there was one instructive exception among my interviewees