9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:40 am

CHAPTER XV: ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM: FOSTERED BY US FOREIGN POLICY

We must stress again that international terrorism should never be seen as a spontaneous sociological phenomenon arising directly out of oppression and misery. International terrorism and national liberation struggles are always mediated through a level of clandestine organization in which the efforts of intelligence agencies come decisively into play. Many international terrorist groups are false-flag operations from the very beginning. Others assume false- flag status as the result of coordinated arrests, assassinations, and takeovers by intelligence agencies. Even where there is an authentic national liberation organization, intelligence agencies will create false-flag operations under their own control to mimic it, perpetrating atrocities in its name in an effort to isolate and discredit it. Here again, deception and dissembling are the rule.

Again and again, terrorist groups with US-UK backing have intervened against progressive nationalists in the Arab world, and in favor of their Islamic fundamentalist competition.

Recruiting for terrorist groups once they exist is another matter. The ability to recruit is profoundly influenced by the prevalence of misery, poverty, and oppression. Here we must account for the relative economic and political distress of the Arab world, and of parts of the broader economic world as well. What we find are the fruits of imperialism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. The political climate in the Arab world today cannot be understood as the outcome of autochthonous factors, as thinkers in the Oswald Spengler Kultur tradition like Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis would have us believe. These experts prefer to forget that the Arab world they see before them has been occupied, trampled, and manipulated by two centuries of European intervention, going back to Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. Neocons such as Lewis and Huntington also prefer a radically anti-historical approach, according to which anti-western Islamic fundamentalism, especially in its terrorist emanations, is simply a self-evident fact. But it is not a self-evident fact, as we now will seek to show.

What needs to be grasped is the fact that US policy, like that of the British Empire earlier, objectively favors the growth of Islamic fundamentalism. Islamic fundamentalism can mean many things, but here it is taken to mean an anti-western theocratic regime in which the Islamic clergy, mullahs, imams, and ayatollahs as they may be, play the leading role. We must recall that, until the Ottoman Empire was destroyed by the British and the French during the First World War, most of the countries of the Middle East had been subject to the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople, who was simultaneously the Caliph of Islam. The Ottoman Empire claimed to operate according to the Islamic law, or sharia. For centuries, the British had cultivated the smaller ethnic groups of the Ottoman Empire with a view to inciting them to rebel against the Ottoman Sultan: thus, the British began working with the Serbs around the time of the American Revolution; they helped the Greeks to become independent after the Napoleonic wars. Under Lord Palmerston in the 1830s and 1840s, the British introduced the ideas of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. At first, British Jews were not interested: Lord Rothschild, it was said at that time, wanted a seat in the House of Lords, not a seat under a palm tree in Palestine. Later, the British developed a presence among the Copts, the Armenians, and others. The French posed as protectors of Christians in the Levant, and became the backers of the Lebanese Maronite Christians.

During these years the British Arab Bureau and the British Indian Office carefully profiled the Arab psychology and ideology. Their starting point was that the Arabs would inevitably become hostile to British colonialism, and that nothing could be done to prevent this. However, these British orientalists also concluded that it might well be possible to provide synthetic ideologies for the inevitable Arab revolt which would help to make it self-isolating, abortive, and impotent. An obvious way to do this was to make the revolt not specifically anti-British, but anti-western and anti-European in general, lest the Arabs be able to ally with Russia or Germany to eject the UK. The Islamic tradition offered the raw material for the fabrication of a synthetic ideology of Arab rejection of the west to which today's more fantastic ideologues of the Arab and Islamic worlds are much indebted.

When the Ottoman Empire took the German side during the First World War, British Col. T.E. Lawrence was able to incite the Arabs of Hedjaz (today's Saudi Arabia) to rebel against the Ottoman sultan. The British in effect promised that all Arab lands occupied by the Ottoman Turks would be turned over to the Arabs when the war had been won. However, with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British also promised part of this same territory to the Jews for their homeland. To make matters worse, the British and the French also promised most of these same lands to each other in the secret Sykes- Picot agreement.

Precisely because it was imperial, Ottoman imperial rule had not been conducive to intellectual or material progress -- as had been understood by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini and Nicholas Cusanus in the latter half of the fifteenth century when the Ottoman domination was beginning. The Ottoman peoples did not participate in the European reformation and the wars of religion, notably the Thirty Years War, which had convinced Europeans that political solutions and war-avoidance were better than hecatombs of slaughter waged by doctrinaire religious factions. Ottoman economic development also lagged behind that of Europe. Because of these conditions, there are basically four types of regimes which are currently possible in the ex- Ottoman territories. These are:

1. Reactionarv Monarchies -This was the variant at first favored by the British when they occupied various Arab states under the League of Nations mandates after 1918. Working with the House of Saud and the Hashemite family, the British promoted monarchy in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. These regimes, like that of King Farouk in Egypt, were widely viewed as corrupt puppets of the imperialists who were not interested in national progress, but rather in amassing private wealth. In Saudi Arabia, for example, human chattel slavery remained legal until 1965, and was widely practiced after that, especially in households. Household slavery also remains common in the Gulf emirates, and explodes onto the local pages of the Washington papers every now and then when a visiting diplomat from the Gulf brings a personal slave or two on a diplomatic mission. Ironically, chattel slavery was abolished in Kuwait thanks to the Iraqi invasion of 1990, but was then re-established with the help of Bush's Operation Desert Storm in 1991. (Tarpley 1996) Most of the Arab monarchs were overthrown, although monarchy still hangs on in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and among the petty princelings of the Gulf: Iran, although not an Arab country, was ruled by an emperor until 1979. Clearly, these regimes are not suitable for the task of economic development and general progress in their countries.

2. Modernizing Nationalist Regimes -- These may be democratic republics, but they are more likely to be military governments possibly evolving into plebiscitary forms of democracy. They may call themselves Arab socialists, as Nasser did. The best hope the Arabs had of sharing in the level of scientific and technological progress attained in the most advanced parts of the world was offered by nationalist regimes whose program was one of economic development and modernization. The first example was that of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, who created the first permanent republic in Asia, the Turkish Republic of 1923. Rejecting the sultanate and the caliphate in favor of the Turkish nation, Ataturk implemented the separation of mosque and state, making Turkey a modern, secular republic. He introduced the Roman alphabet in place of Arabic script, outlawed the veil for women and the fez for men, and promoted the European hat as the "headgear of civilization." Harems were discouraged, while women were given the right to vote and held public office. Ataturk introduced the Gregorian calendar, the metric system, and family names. A dirigist Five-Year plan for economic development was introduced in 1933. Public law was based on modern European criminal and civil codes, rather than the sharia. Ataturk saw religion as a matter of purely personal and private belief and preference, and all religions were tolerated. Ataturk would have to rank at or near the top of any list of the nation-builders and modernizers of the twentieth century. Among his other achievements, he helped Turkey to be the only defeated power of World War I which escaped fascist rule. In retrospect, if there was one experiment in the Moslem world which the US should have supported, it was that of Ataturk. If his ideas had prevailed more generally, there could be no talk of the clash of civilizations today. Given this impressive record, how did the Allies of World War I, including the United States treat Ataturk? They tried with every means possible to overthrow him, to isolate him, and to carve Turkey into a series of petty states. In the Peace of Paris in 1919, the Treaty of Versailles with Germany was bad, but the Treaty of Sevres which was imposed upon Turkey was an act of grotesque lunacy. It was clearly the peace to end all peace. Turkey was supposed to be divided into French, Italian, and Greek zones of occupation, while the Bosporus and the Dardanelles were occupied by the British and French. There was an attempt to create an independent Armenia in eastern Anatolia. The British and French even attempted to lure the US into taking over a piece of Turkey, but in those days the US was smart enough to decline. That was fortunate, since Ataturk was able to defeat the armies the Allies threw at him; he was able to guarantee the national independence and territorial integrity of Turkey. His brutal treatment of Greek and Armenians, who were fighting for the Allies, must be seen in this context.

3. Hereditary Dictatorships -- These hereditary dictatorships have emerged after the fall of monarchies, and sometimes occur as a degenerate form of the nationalist-modernizing state. Key examples are the regime of Hafez Assad and his son in Syria after 1963, and indeed that of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, with the first being far more odious. Hafez Assad ruled a murderous, pervasive police state in which the minority Allawites ruled over a resentful majority. Yet, Assad always the darling of New York and London: Kissinger once said that he hoped God would forgive him, but that there would always be a soft spot in his heart for Hafez Assad. The regimes of the Assads in Syria, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and of the mercurial Colonel Qaddafi in Libya can be assimilated to this group.

4. Fundamentalist Theocracies -- The leading example is Iran, which is enough to show that this form cannot be effective for national development in the hostile climate of globalization. In 1978, President Carter's National Security Director Zbigniew Brzezinski, anxious to avenge Soviet support for North Vietnam against the US in the recent Vietnam War, was convinced by British Arabists and orientalists that Islamic fundamentalism could be used to destabilize the five large Moslem-majority republics of Soviet central Asia -- Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Khirgizia, and Turkmenistan. This outlook could also be employed to disrupt the ethnic labyrinth of the Caucasus and Trans-Caucasus -- notably in Chechnya. In this way, Brzezinski argued, Islamic fundamentalism could become the definitive "bulwark against communism." In order to provide a powerful center from which this new ideology could radiate, Brzezinski and Carter connived to foment a typical CIA "people power" pseudo-revolution, this time with Islamic fundamentalist overtones, in order to overthrow the Shah of Iran in 1979. The Shah was personally in many respects a monster, and his Savak secret police were as murderous as any in the world. However, the Shah was bringing in European construction firms to create infrastructure and whole new cities; a good example was the immense building operation at Bandar Abbas (today Bandar Khomeini) by the Italian civil engineering firm Condotte d'Acqua under Loris Corbi. But since the Shah could not tolerate free political activity, he had no effective mass political party to support him. The chosen instrument for the Shah's ouster was the benighted Ayatollah Khomeini, a figure of ineffable darkness, worse than Savonarola. Let there be no mistake: Brzezinski did everything to overthrow the Shah, and then to make sure that no secular politician like Shapour Baktiar took power in his stead: US Air Force Gen. Robert Huyser from Al Haig's NATO staff was sent to Iran with the message that only Khomeini would be acceptable to the United States. (Dreyfus and La Levee 50-53) The rise of Khomeini represented a novelty in the recent history of the Middle East: it was a theocracy of the Islamic clerics or mullahs, bankrolled by wealthy bazaar merchants and related interests. The ascendancy of Khomeini meant that Iran's economic and cultural development was frozen -- or in reverse -- for most of two decades. But Khomeini's Iran did become a center of propagation of lslamic fundamentalist ideology, just as Brzezinski had intended, although the Soviets were not the only ones to pay the price. Soon the US-UK intelligence agencies were able to play Iraq against Iran in the 8-year long Gulf War of the 1980s, which wrecked and bankrupted both societies even further. The Israelis were so pleased with this war that they wanted it to go on forever, while the Iranian mullahs organized suicidal human wave assaults by little children against prepared and fortified Iraqi positions.

Despite neocon blathering about democracy, and Bush's so-called Middle East initiative, the US never had any serious plans for democracy in Iraq. To begin with, the US cannot seriously be described as a democracy; the US is currently an oligarchy in Plato's precise definition of a "constitution teeming with many evils ... based on a property qualification ... wherein the rich hold office and the poor man is excluded," a system favoring "the member of a ruling class -- oligarchy." (Republic 544c, 550c, 545a) Sure enough, the regime created by the US in Iraq in the spring of 2003 was an ... oligarchy, composed of twenty-five handpicked puppet oligarchs with a weak revolving presidency. Such arrangements have been perpetuated after the alleged restoration of Iraqi sovereignty. US interference in post-communist Russia favored oligarchical domination through the Yeltsin coterie in a similar way. As of right now, there is probably not a sufficient material-economic basis for western-style democracy in Iraq, although after several years of economic reconstruction there might well be. But in any case, it is clear that the US as presently constituted is no longer a progressive force on the world scene -- which was not always the case in the past.

The open secret of the post-1945 world is that the US and the other NATO states have systematically and implacably opposed the reasonable alternative of modernizing secular nationalism among the Arab and Islamic states, while favoring the fundamentalist alternative, the more benighted the better. Modernizing secular nationalists are by far the most effective adversaries of the imperialists -- they have the potential to score real political, diplomatic and cultural gains for their countries. Theocratic reactionaries are easier to isolate, since their appeal is more circumscribed. In practice, Washington and London have always fostered the rise of fundamentalists, while attempting to eliminate modernizing nationalists.

It must be added that while fundamentalist figures like Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran were baneful from every point of view, there are today perfectly reasonable figures who identify themselves as Islamists -- people like Adel Hussein of Egypt and Hassan Turabi of Sudan. These figures seem to represent something of the progressive impulses of the 1950s-1960s, expressed today within the dominant Islamic idiom. Significantly, these figures are incessantly vilified and targeted by imperialists of all stripes. If reasonable policies were ever to re- emerge in the west, reasonable Islamists would have no trouble in finding modes of cooperation.
Despite US-UK hostility, Arab leaders of the Nasser type had some margin of maneuver as long as the Soviets offered some kind of an alternative to Washington and London. But as the USSR weakened and finally disintegrated, this margin grew narrower and finally disappeared in 1991, when the Soviets could do nothing for their former ally, Iraq.

Iran -- After World War II, the first attempt to renew the progressive nationalism of Ataturk came with the rise of Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran. Mossadeq's program centered on the 1951 nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, known today as BP. With the breaking of the British protectorate in Iran, the fledgling CIA of Allen Dulles and Kermit Roosevelt organized a military coup against Mossadeq, which was followed by a restoration of imperialist control over Iran's oil, and an era of political reaction under the Shah.

Egypt -- In 1952, a group of nationalist army officers ousted the notoriously corrupt and inept King Farouk. A coup by junior officers brought Colonel Gamal abd el Nasser to power. Nasser's progressive nationalist program was based on the expulsion of the British occupation forces, followed by the nationalization of the Suez Canal, with the canal tolls being used to finance the building of the Aswan High Dam on the Upper Nile. The Aswan project was key for flood control and hydroelectric energy, on the model of FDR's Tennessee Valley Authority. After the British were gone, Nasser seized the canal with great fanfare, becoming an Egyptian national hero. Nasser was quickly opposed by British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden and the Dulles brothers, and soon became the target of a British-French-Israeli intrigue: Israel would launch a surprise attack across the Sinai, and an Anglo-French task force would seize the canal under the guise of restoring order. This crude conspiracy led to the Suez crisis of October-November 1956, and was seen as a personal affront by US President Eisenhower. After the USSR issued a unique nuclear ultimatum to the British and French, threatening London and Paris with nuclear destruction, the US and the USSR joined in the UN Security Council to vote against the old-style Anglo-French imperialists and their Israeli auxiliaries. The US position in the post- 1956 Middle East was founded on the broad sympathy won when Washington torpedoed the adventurous plans of the British and French imperialists. Sadly, those gains were totally squandered during the subsequent decades, as the US itself assumed the role of the chief imperial oppressor of the Arab states. But in 1956, Nasser's Egypt had clearly emerged as the leading Arab state. Egypt became the nucleus of an attempted re-unification of the Arab world in the form of a secular United Arab Republic, which Syria and Yemen joined, and towards which Iraq gravitated for a time. Nasser used his radio, the Voice of the Arabs, to condemn the Saudi monarchy for its practice of chattel slavery, especially of black Africans. Egypt became the target of another Israeli pre-emptive attack in the June 1967 Six-Day War, and was unable fully to recover in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which was orchestrated by Kissinger. As for Nasser, he was hounded mercilessly until he died in 1970. He was replaced by Sadat, who ousted the Soviet advisers Nasser had brought in. But even Sadat was too much of a nationalist for the Anglo-Americans: he was assassinated in 1980 by a group which included al-Zawahiri, today alleged to be Bin Laden's right-hand man and personal physician. Despite his role in the Sadat assassination, Zawahiri was able to live openly in London for years. This suggests that Zawahiri is indeed an asset of MI-6.

Iraq -- When the British seized control of Iraq in 1919, they installed a reactionary monarchy of the Hashemites. In 1958, the puppet monarch King Feisal was assassinated. General Kassem became prime minister and instituted a program of modernizing reforms, including the progressive constitution of 1959. The 1959 Iraqi constitution and other Kassem-era legislation made literacy compulsory, abolished slavery, and guaranteed equal rights for women. The impact of these reforms was permanent. To cite only one example, during the mid-1970s the Iraqi Ambassador to Rome was a highly intelligent woman, Selima Bakir. As any Iraqi nationalist would, Kassem assumed the position that Kuwait was an integral part of Iraq. In this he was correct since Kuwait had been illegally detached from the Ottoman Empire by the British in 1899 to prevent the German-sponsored Berlin to Baghdad railway from ever reaching the head of the Gulf. In 1962 the British fomented a revolt of the Kurds under the Barzani clan, and Kassem was assassinated in 1963. With the death of Kassem, the chance for successful development in Iraq was severely limited. The positive features of Iraq during the Saddam Hussein years were largely inherited from the Kassem era.

Pakistan -- The great opportunity for modernization in Pakistan came under Ali Bhutto in the mid-1970s. Bhutto was determined to advance his country to the leading edge of modern technology with a peaceful nuclear energy program in the Eisenhower Atoms for Peace tradition. He was soon confronted by Kissinger, who threatened to make a terrible example of him unless he desisted from his ambitious development plans. Shortly thereafter, Bhutto was overthrown by the US-supported coup of General Zia ul Haq. Bhutto was framed up on various charges and hanged by the new regime in accordance with Kissinger's earlier threats. Bhutto's wife and children later took refuge in West Germany. Fundamentalist tendencies have grown in the era following the death of Bhutto.

Kosovo -- When the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began to break up in 1991, the ethnic Albanian Moslem population of the province of Kosovo under the leadership of the secular nationalist LDK party responded by a highly effective non-violent self-organizing process, which allowed them to defy the Serb occupiers for most of the rest of the 1990s. Using the tools of passive resistance, the Kosovars created their own parallel government, including their own school system, their own separate elections, their own public health system, and their own parallel system of economic enterprises. The leader of this magnificent effort was Ibrahim Rugova, who made pilgrimage after pilgrimage to Washington during the 1990s, always sporting the Parisian red silk scarf which was his trademark. But the US was never willing to lift a finger for Rugova and the eminently reasonable LDK. When Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia declared independence from Serb- dominated Yugoslavia, Rugova hesitated: the Kosovars, unlike the others, had no guns, and the US had never provided them. In 1997, the neighboring state of Albania, with which the Kosovars wished to be united, disintegrated as the result of the collapse of a series of Ponzi-scheme financial speculations. As the Albanian state collapsed, its weapons depots were looted, and many of these weapons soon found their way across the border into Kosovo. This engendered the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a very dubious outfit composed of narcotics smugglers, Islamic fundamentalists from Kosovo and abroad, and out-and-out terrorists. As the KLA's clashes with the Serbian police and army increased, the Serbs responded as any occupier would, and atrocities on both sides became the order of the day. In the event the US, in the person of Madeleine Albright, became the direct sponsor of the terrorist KLA. Starting in March, 1999, the US and NATO waged a criminal 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia, one of the great acts of international vandalism in the late twentieth century -- all in support of KLA-related demands. As for Rugova and the LDK, they were trampled, and the US depended more and more on the KLA.

Afghanistan -- This country was able to manage some slow modernization during the 1950s under King Mohammed Zahir, who had assumed the throne in 1933. Afghan development has always hinged on a large hydroelectric and water project in the center of the country, which has never been fully carried out. The King was deposed in 1973, and by 1978 there emerged the progressive regime of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a pro- Marxist poet and novelist with very special talents. Taraki legalized trade unions, instituted a minimum wage, and promoted housing, health care, and public sanitation. He favored improvements in the status of women. Taraki tried to eradicate the cultivation of the opium poppy, which had made his country the world's leading producer of heroin. Taraki also cancelled all debts owed by farmers, including tenant farmers, and began a land reform program to break up the holdings of absentee landlords and latifundists. Taraki thus offended the feudal interest, which was strong in the country. Brzezinski regarded Taraki as a Soviet asset, although he was largely indigenous in origin. As Brzezinski later boasted to the Nouvel Ohservateur, US destabilization teams launched a clandestine operation against Taraki in early 1979, prominently playing the Islamic fundamentalist card. In September 1979 there followed a US-backed coup by the CIA asset Hafizulla Amin, who executed Taraki and rolled back his reforms in the name of setting up a fundamentalist Islamic state in the service of the feudal landowners. Amin's reactionary measures resulted in a backlash against him, and he was himself toppled within two months. In the face of renewed assaults by Brzezinski's opium-poppy mujaheddin, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan at Christmas, 1979. During the various phases of the Afghan war that followed, the CIA always supported the most benighted, the most reactionary, the most opium-mongering factions -- especially their favorite, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The CIA was looking for forces of absolute self-isolating negativity, incapable of getting along with Iran or anyone else. In the decade of war that followed (December 1979-February 1989), Afghanistan was economically and demographically destroyed. The second generation of Brzezinski's mujaheddin, the Islamic fundamentalist students or Taliban, assumed power in 1994. Like Pol Pot in Cambodia in the wake of Kissinger's bombing destruction of that country in the 1970s, the Taliban represented an unspeakable retrogression towards barbarity. But, just as Kissinger and G.H.W. Bush had supported Pol Pot, the Bush 41 administration found many ways to support the Taliban, who were viewed as ideal because of their inability to ally with Iran or any of the ex-Soviet central Asian republics. As Michael Parenti has pointed out, the US taxpayers paid the salaries of the entire Taliban government in 1999. (Parenti 65) And under Bush 43, this support became even more explicit, as UNOCAL lobbyists sought a deal with the Taliban to build their oil pipeline to central Asia. During this phase, Kissinger, neocon Zalmay Khalilzad, retired State Department anti-terror official Robert Oakley and Leili Helms (daughter of the former CIA director) were successfully lobbying on behalf of Unocal. The goal was to keep the Taliban regime off the State Department terrorist state list, since listing there would have blocked any pipeline deal. In his first spring in office, Bush offered a large grant to the Taliban. This caused columnist Robert Scheer to comment: "Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti-US terrorists, destroy every vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush administration will embrace you. That's the message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan. The gift ... makes the US the main sponsor of the Taliban." ("Bush's Faustian Deal with the Taliban," Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2001)

Palestine -- After Israeli had occupied the west bank of the Jordan River, the Gaza strip and the Sinai peninsula in June, 1967, the Israelis found themselves ruling over some two million Palestinians. Under the United Nations system it is illegal to annex territory acquired through armed conflict without the approval of the United Nations Security Council, which in this case was not forthcoming. Rather, the UNSC passed resolution 242, calling on Israel to withdraw to the internationally recognized borders as they had been before June 1967. (In the run-up to the Iraq war, Bush spokesmen accused Iraq of having violated some 17 United Nations Security Council resolutions; they conveniently forgot that Israel was the all-time champion in that department, since Israel is currently in violation of some 30 UNSC resolutions regarded the territories it has occupied since 1967. But the US never proposed war to enforce compliance with those resolutions.) The Israeli occupation of conquered Palestine was oppressive and humiliating, and a national resistance soon emerged in the form of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Its leader was Yassir Arafat, a secular nationalist more or less in the Nasser mold. Since the PLO had few weapons, and since the Israeli army was a dominant presence, the PLO began doing what the Jews had done between 1945 and 1948 against the British occupation of the same territory: they launched guerilla warfare, which the occupiers quickly labeled terrorism. The official Israeli line was that there was no Palestinian people, but this was soon disproved. From the beginning, the Israeli Mossad was active in conducting provocations which it sought to attribute to the PLO and its peripheries: attacks on airliners and on the 1972 Olympic games in Munich are therefore of uncertain paternity. The more horrendous the atrocity, the greater the backlash of world public opinion against the PLO. There is no doubt that the Mossad controlled a part of the central committee of the organization known as Abu Nidal, after the nom de guerre of its leader, Sabri al Banna. In 1987-88, just as the first Palestinian intifada uprising was getting under way, there emerged in the occupied territories the organization known as Hamas. Hamas combined a strong commitment to neighborhood social services with the rejection of negotiations with Israel and the demand for a military solution which was sure to be labeled terrorism. Interestingly enough, one of the leading sponsors of Hamas was Ariel Sharon, a former general who was then a cabinet minister. These facts are widely recognized; US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurzer, an observant Jew, stated late in 2001 that Hamas had emerged "with the tacit support of Israel" because in the late 1980s "Israel perceived it would be better to have people turning toward religion, rather than toward a nationalistic cause." (Ha'aretz, Dec. 21, 2001) In an acrimonious Israeli cabinet debate around the same time, Israeli extremist Knesset member Silva Shalom stated:

"between Hamas and Arafat, I prefer Hamas ... Arafat is a terrorist in a diplomat's suit, while the Hamas can be hit unmercifully." (Ha'aretz, Dec. 4, 2001) This tirade provoked a walkout by Shimon Peres and the other Labor Party ministers. Arafat added his own view, which was that "Hamas is a creature of Israel which, at the time of Prime Minister Shamir, gave them money and more than 700 institutions, among them schools, universities, and mosques. Even [Israeli Prime Minister] Rabin ended up admitting it, when I charged him with it, in the presence of Mubarak." (Corriere della Sera, Dec. 11, 2001) With incredible arrogance, the Bush administration has pronounced Arafat as unfit to be a negotiating partner. In effect, they are choosing Hamas -- or worse, an act of incalculable folly for Israel and for the United States as well.

This list could go on and on. In Bangladesh, Kissinger persecuted Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of the Awami League, the leading nationalist force on the scene after independence in the early 1970s. In Lebanon, Kissinger did everything possible to destroy the 1943 multi-sectarian constitution and set off a civil war. Later, when Gen. Aoun, a Maronite Christian but much more a Lebanese nationalist, attempted to save the country's independence, he was sabotaged by the United States.

The flip side of this pattern is the brutal treatment meted out to those in Europe who have wanted to make development deals with the Arab states on the obvious basis of mutual advantage. A celebrated case is that of Enrico Mattei, the president of the Italian state oil company, ENI. Mattei was famous for challenging the Anglo- American Seven Sisters oil cartel's dominance of Arab nations by offering the Arabs an alternative partner and a better deal: a fifty- fifty split in place of the lopsided 60-40 or worse profit sharing offered by the Anglo-American cartel. Mattei's private jet was tampered with by the CIA, resulting in his death in a plane crash near Milan in October 1962. The German banker Juergen Ponto was interested in financing development projects in the Arab world and in Africa; he was eliminated by the Baader-Meinhof gang in 1977. It is evident that the Baader-Meinhof was acting as a false-flag operation for CIA and MI-6. There were some thirty attempts to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle. There were many motivations for this, but a prominent one was the pro-Arab diplomacy of the French government.

Given the implacable US and NATO persecution of progressive Arab nationalist leaders, this breed has tended to disappear entirely from the scene, With the remaining choices narrowed to reactionary monarchies, such as the Saudis, repressive dictatorships, such as that typified by Hafez Assad, or experiments with Islamic fundamentalism, it is not surprising that many young Arabs regard the fundamentalists as the viable option. If the western powers do not like this, they must be reminded that it is they who have, with their mindless imperialist arrogance, rendered the progressive nationalists almost extinct.

As I stated in 1994 in my address to the Inter-Religious Conference in Khartoum, Sudan, the basis of Christianity comes down to the two great commandments: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. Love of God is a matter of faith, about the details of which it may prove impossible to agree. But where agreement is eminently possible is the second sphere: love your neighbor, the Golden Rule. In today's world, love your neighbor means good works in the form of large-scale economic and infrastructural development projects to tackle the still-unfinished business of the post-1945 world: the integral scientific, technological, and economic advancement of the former colonial sector, of the third world. Here Christian charity converges with Moslem social solidarity, with Confucian benevolence, with the similar imperatives in Buddhism and Hinduism, and with the imperatives readily embraced by secularists of good will.

Not so long ago, the world witnessed United Nations Development Decades, oil for technology conferences, and related international efforts to promote world economic development. Today such efforts have disappeared. All that remains is globalization, which is destroying the Arab and Islamic worlds in the same way it is destroying every other part of the planet. Deranged thinkers like Huntington, Brzezinski, and Kissinger imagine that their crude geopolitics is a clever, even cunning pursuit of US imperial self- interest. In reality, their policies are suicidal. If we wish to identify some policies which have actually worked well for the United States in past years, the census looks as follows:

The Monroe Doctrine, for establishing the United States as a supporter of the rights of small nations to the freedom of the seas, and as an opponent of European colonialism.

The Atlantic Charter of 1941, for proposing the Four Freedoms -- freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, freedom from want -- as the basis for the postwar world.

The Bretton Woods system of 1944-1971, for using New Deal methods to foster the greatest economic expansion the world has ever seen.

The Marshal Plan of 1947, for providing a model of economic reconstruction for war-ravaged Europe, and for preventing a resurgence of economic depression in the US.

The US response to the 1956 Suez crisis, for repudiating imperial domination of the Middle East, and advocating fair treatment for the Arabs.

The strong world position of the US in the third quarter of the twentieth century was largely due to these policies. Today's neocons and their fellow travelers are structurally incapable of advocating anything so effective. New leadership in the wake of the expected US party re-alignment is required. These policies must of course be supplemented by the creation of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state in the west bank and Gaza, made viable by a comprehensive economic development program from which all states in the region, including Israel, should benefit. In the meantime, the US must drop its double standard on terrorism: Israel's policy of targeted assassination of its opponents without benefit of judicial process is the essence of state sponsored terrorism, no matter how many times it is endorsed by Cheney. The US has armed Israel with $70 billion worth of weapons, including the F-16s and missiles which are used to kill Palestinian civilians in direct violation of US law. All such US aid should be used as a lever to secure Israeli acceptance of the two-state solution. These steps would go far towards inhibiting terrorist recruitment.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:45 am

PART 1 OF 2

CHAPTER XVI: ELECTION 2004: IN THE SHADOW OF SYNTHETIC TERRORISM AND WAR

It will happen here.
-- Bush administration official, spring 2004.


By the end of May 2004, an intelligence pattern pointed conclusively to the grave and open-ended threat of a new round of synthetic ABC (atomic-bacteriological-chemical) terror attacks in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and possibly other nations. This threat included nuclear detonations, radiological dirty bombs, poison gas and other chemical weapons, or biological agents, to be unleashed in such urban settings as New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, Vancouver BC, or London. The putative goal of these operations was to produce a worldwide shock several orders of magnitude greater than the original 9/11, with a view to stopping the collapse of the Bush administration, the Wall Street-centered financial structures, and the US-UK strategic position generally. US/UK intelligence was prepared to attribute responsibility to controlled patsy terrorist groups, which in turn the media would link to countries like Iran, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, or Saudi Arabia, thus setting these states up for attack. Behind the threat was substantially the same secret command cell in the United States which set up the 9/11 events, which had been able to continue in operation because of the abject failure of all 9/11 investigations to identify them. These forces were in a desperate flight forward to escape from their increasingly grim position. Their goal was to establish a neocon fascist dictatorship in the United States, complete with martial law, special tribunals, press and media censorship, and the full pervasive apparatus of the modern police state.

The chatter in Washington in late spring 2004 pointed to state-sponsored terrorism on a grand scale, with the desperados of the neocon faction calling the shots. The rogues were once again inclined to score an "own goal" of the Americans. Given the prominence of the Congress, it could also have been called Operation Guy Fawkes, recalling the state plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament on November 5, 1605.

Reliance on synthetic terrorism as a matter of rasion d'etat was like a heroin habit: as each dose wore off, another and more powerful injection was required. In May 2002, some 300 government, military and business executives met in a seminar entitled "Homeland Security 2005: Charting the Course Ahead, " which was conducted by the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security. ANSER ("Advancing National Strategy and Enabling Results") was created in 1958 by RAND and the Air Force as a contract advisory agency on national security. The seminar participants were already lamenting that the government had not "managed to engage the American people" in supporting the urgency of changes in national security organization. UPI reported that "several participants" -- who asked to remain anonymous -- said "they felt that without another terrorist incident, keeping public attention to the gaps in security and support for the expenditures was growing more difficult." Conference speakers included Lawrence Castro, NSA Coordinator for Homeland Security Support; Rear Admiral Richard Cobbold, Director of Britain's Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies; Leon Fuerth; Frank Gaffney; several officials of the Office of Homeland Security; and numerous former Defense Department and CIA officials. (ANSER web site, May 6, 2002)

The new phase in the campaign for martial law and a state of emergency began during the closing months of 2003, when it was clear to insiders that the Iraq adventure was headed for defeat. In his year-end column of December 31, 2003, New York Times neocon and Nixon emeritus William Safire cynically predicted that the "October surprise" for the 2004 election would come in the form of "a major terror attack in the US." The United States was, in short, once more threatened by a coup d'etat -- not a coup against the existing government, but an operation aimed at shocking, disciplining and dragooning the entire political process for escalated foreign aggression, with the homeland secured by emergency rule. It went without saying that those associated with such a coup were felons, war criminals, and traitors to their country.

On May 26, 2004 Attorney General Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller announced a coming summer "perfect storm" of terrorism. According to advance wire service reports, US officials had "obtained new intelligence deemed highly credible indicating Al- Qaeda or other terrorists are in the United States and preparing to launch a major attack this summer ... (AP, May 25, 2004) This was accompanied by an unprecedented propaganda barrage. A few samples will suffice.

THE BUSH REGIME TALKS TERROR

Bush and Cheney had made the demagogy of terror their stock in trade, their daily bread, since 9/11. But April 2004 marked a watershed, a qualitative escalation. On April 21, Bush delivered two speeches which represented a palpable escalation of the tone of his usual fear. In the afternoon, he assured the Newspaper Association of America, composed of newspaper editors, that Iran "will be dealt with" if they pursue a nuclear development program. Bush went on to characterize the United States as "a battlefield in the war on terror." He was at pains to build up the stature of Al-Qaeda, whose members he emphatically characterized as "smart ... tough ... and sophisticated." Because the terrorists were so formidable, Bush said the United States "is a hard country to defend. Our intelligence is good. It's just never perfect, is the problem. We are disrupting some cells here in America. We're chasing people down. But it is -- we've got a big country."

Later, Bush spoke to the same themes at a closed-door gathering at the White House: "... On Tuesday evening, Bush told Republican congressional leaders during a meeting at the White House that it was all but certain that terrorists would attempt a major attack on the United States before the election, according to a congressional aide. The leaders were struck by Bush's definitiveness and gravity, the aide said ..." (Washington Post, April 22, 2004)

It must be remembered that synthetic terrorism depends on many people doing things that make sense to them within their own limited purviews, but which are in fact dictated by the needs of the operation of which they are a part. Bush might think he was just practicing smart politics by inculcating fear in the US citizenry. The reality behind the statements was an insurrectionary network of moles inside the federal government who would stop at nothing. They marched to the tune of a private command center outside of the government which also deployed patsies and expert professionals. Not every official who parroted the terror line was aware of what was coming, but his speech writer or other handlers might be. When we come to figures like Cheney, the likelihood that he was a witting participant rises substantially.

Vice President Cheney had been predicting imminent terrorist attacks on the US in many of his speeches since no later than May 20, 2002. On that day, Cheney went on Fox News Sunday to announce that "In my opinion, the prospects of a future attack against the United States are almost certain." For Cheney, the question of a new terrorist assault on the US is "not a matter of if, but when."

Several weeks later, an account published under the title "White House Nightmare Scenario" in the "Washington Whispers" column of US News and World Report reflected the thinking of top Bush officials about the relation between terrorism and the coming US presidential elections. According to this article, 'White House officials say they've got a "working premise" about terrorism and the presidential election: It's going to happen. "We assume," says a top administration official, "an attack will happen leading up to the election." And, he added, "it will happen here." There are two worst-case scenarios, the official says. The first posits an attack on Washington, possibly the Capitol, which was believed to be the target of the 9/11 jet that crashed in Pennsylvania. Theory 2: smaller but more frequent attacks in Washington and other major cities leading up to the election. To prepare, the administration has been holding secret anti-terrorism drills to make sure top officials know what to do. "There was a sense," says one official involved in the drills, "of mass confusion on 9/11. Now we have a sense of order." Unclear is the political impact, though most Bushies think the nation would rally around the president. "I can tell you one thing," adds the official sternly, "we won't be like Spain," which tossed its government days after the Madrid train bombings.' (US News and World Report, 17 May 2004)

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told Fox News on Sunday, April 19, that the government was bracing for possible terrorist attacks before November's Presidential election. Referencing March's Madrid bombings, she said the opportunity for terrorists to influence the election might "be too good to pass up for them," and that "the terrorists might have learned, we hope, the wrong lesson from Spain." Rice expatiated on this theme: "I think we also have to take seriously that [terrorists] might try during the cycle leading up to the election to do something .... In some ways, it seems like it would be too good to pass up for them, and so we are actively looking at that possibility, actively trying to make certain that we are responding appropriately." Hinting that preparations to defend against a terror attack might not be successful, she added, "The hard thing about terrorism is that they only have to be right once, and we have to be right 100 percent of the time. And nobody can be certain there won't be another attack."

AZNAR'S ATTEMPTED TERROR-ASSISTED COUP

Condoleezza Rice's remarks came in the context of a lengthy US tour by Jose Maria Aznar, the defeated Spanish Prime Minister. Aznar was ousted in Spain's March 13 elections, partly because 90% of Spaniards rejected Aznar's subservience to Bush in joining the US invasion coalition in Iraq, and partly because Spanish voters were convinced that Aznar was lying about the March 11 terrorist attacks on commuter trains in the Madrid region. Aznar was defeated by the magnificent mobilization of Spanish trade unions and left parties against terrorism; this recalled the actions of the German trade unions, who had stopped the Kapp-Luttwitz putsch of 1920 with a general strike. Aznar was counted as a neocon, and his party contained the remnants of Francisco Franco's falangist-fascist apparatus. Aznar was associated with the thesis that the March 11 terrorist attacks decided the Spanish elections in favor of the PSOE (socialist) challenger, Zapatero. Aznar also claimed that his own defeat was a victory for terrorism, since the newly elected Zapatero, acting in conformity with the will of the Spanish people, withdrew the Spanish troop contingent from Iraq as soon as he had taken office. The Spanish elections were viewed with hysteria by Washington elites, first because of the Spanish quitting the coalition, but also because the terrorist attacks had failed to produce the expected effects. The Washington consensus had previously been that terrorism would infallibly stampede the voters of any country into voting for the incumbent, but this time it was the anti-Bush challenger who was the beneficiary. Aznar was known to have attempted to call off the Spanish vote and to continue to rule by decree, but his efforts were blocked. Aznar's briefing would seem to have included the notion that if there was going to be pre-election terrorism, it needed to be of sufficient magnitude to provide a pretext for calling off all scheduled elections.

In mid-April, Aznar began issuing warnings of election-related terrorism. These warnings were directed most immediately to Tony Blair and George Bush. Aznar said, "1 told George Bush, and Tony Blair and other political leaders to be extremely careful before elections ... and to be very vigilant." (Once Noticias, Once-TV, Mexico, April 19, 2004; EIR, May 22, 2004) During his visit to California, Aznar referred more than once to a terrorist attack taking place in the United States in June, 2004, which would lead to a Federal Emergency Management Agency takeover of the country. (International Herald Tribune, May 15, 16, 17, Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2004)

On May 18, El Pais reported that Aznar had visited Los Angeles, and had then gone on to Washington, where he met Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Present at the meeting, reports El Pais, were various Democratic and Republican Congressmen. After the meeting, during an intervention at the Heritage Foundation, Rumsfeld spoke about Aznar's briefing: "In Spain, in Madrid, the terrorists changed the result of the elections, without any doubt. In a premeditated way. As a consequence of the intentions of the terrorists, the election results were changed. I had dinner with Prime Minister Aznar, and he is convinced that this is how it happened." In California, Aznar told the press on Monday that Islamic terrorism has as objective to influence elections in democratic countries. "If they could do it in Spain, why would they not intend to do it in another place?" he said and added, "It's important to understand that the terrorists will do everything to change the next elections in the USA. They will do everything possible to make the U.S. fail."

He furthermore said in Los Angeles that he thought that the government of Zapatero sent an "inappropriate message to the terrorists by withdrawing the troops." Aznar also had a 40-minute meeting with President Bush in the White House. Present at the meeting were: Vice President Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card. The White House press spokesman identified the meeting as "private" -- "a meeting with a good friend of the President."

An important sidelight on these statements by Aznar was the revelation that the group accused of carrying out the Madrid bombings was thoroughly penetrated by informants working for the Spanish police, according to El Mundo of May 6, 2004. The Madrid bombings were synthetic terrorism. El Mundo reported that among the people arrested for the Madrid bombing were two police informants. This paper published an exclusive report given by Rafa Zhueri, who was among those arrested after the bombings. Zhueri revealed that he had worked for years as a police informant for a part of the Spanish Civil Guard (UCO -- Undidad Central Operativa). The article was headlined "I informed the Civil Guard that an Asturian offered me dynamite." The US controlled corporate media ignored these astounding revelations.

More information on the extremely suspicious nature of the Madrid bombing was reported by the Swiss daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung on May 27, 2004 in an article entitled "Crime Under the Eyes of the Police." This lengthy piece expressed amazement that the alleged perpetrators of these terrorist acts were not sophisticated sleeper-cell agents, but notorious criminals well-known over many years to European intelligence agencies, including the Spanish ones. Jamal Zougham, one of the main suspects, was arrested after March 11. He had also been rounded up after September 11, 2001. Although well- known to police and intelligence services of Spain and France and under continuous investigation, he was nevertheless allowed to travel to France, Germany, Britain, and Norway, where he met with others under surveillance as terrorists. Furthermore, at least two of those arrested in Madrid had been previously identified as active in drug- trafficking. In addition, the mine worker who was accused of having procured the explosives for the March 11 attacks was also a known drug dealer. There were reliable reports that he and another of those arrested had worked as police informants. The mystery was therefore why such people were able to prepare a bomb attack of such dimensions under the noses of the police, the NZZ wrote. The article suggested that the real operation was perpetrated not by these suspects, but by others. In reality, those now under arrest most probably represented a collection of patsies. The real prime suspects in the Madrid attacks were neither ETA nor Al-Qaeda, but rather Spanish and Italian neofascists of the Stefano delle Chiaie school, whose modus operandi has always been attacks on trains, as seen in the 1974 Italicus bombing, and the 1980 Bologna railroad station explosion which killed upwards of 80 persons.

The 9/11 commission was an investigative failure and a blatant coverup, but it did serve as an excellent propaganda soapbox for figures such as the former Navy Secretary and establishment operative John Lehman. In the spring 2004 New York sessions of the commission, Lehman stressed repeatedly that the overwhelming consensus among US officials is that new terror attacks are coming soon. This view was shared by former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani. It was repeated by Kean and Hamilton when the 9/11 commission's report was delivered.

KERRY EMBRACES THE TERROR MYTH

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry did not offer an alternative to the Bush demagogy of terror. Instead, the Skull & Bones Boston Brahmin oligarch Kerry enthusiastically embraced the Bush-Cheney nightmare vision of the United States as a nuclear terrorist battlefield. While Kerry might have believed that he was merely pandering to the demands of certain pro-Likud pressure groups, he was in fact providing precious credibility and cover to the most sinister plot yet directed against the United States. On May 27, Kerry began a series of speeches billed as his 11-day foreign policy tour. "The single greatest threat we face in the world today [is] a terrorist armed with nuclear weapons," Kerry said in Palm Beach on June 1. "Take away politics, strip away the labels: since that dark day in September, have we done everything we could to secure these dangerous weapons and bomb making materials? No! ... There was a time when the possibility of nuclear war was the most important responsibility entrusted to every American President. The phrase 'having your finger on the nuclear button' meant something very real ... The proposal I am laying out today: to ask that America launch a new mission ... to prevent the world's deadliest weapons from falling into the world's most dangerous hands. If we secure all bomb-making materials, ensure that no new materials are produced for nuclear weapons, and end nuclear weapons programs in hostile states like North Korea and Iran, we can and will dramatically reduce the possibility of nuclear terrorism ... Here's what we must do: The first step is to safeguard all bomb-making material worldwide. That means making sure we know where they are, and then locking them up and securing them wherever they are. Our approach should treat all nuclear materials needed for bombs as if they were bombs."

Kerry was also ready to go Bush one better by adding Saudi Arabia to the target list for economic warfare and possible invasion, a notion long dear to Likudniks which has been gaining ground among some US pseudo-leftists lately. Kerry's prescription was for energy independence in order to obtain a free hand to settle with the Saudis: "If we are serious about energy independence, then we can finally be serious about confronting the role of Saudi Arabia in financing and providing ideological support of Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups," Kerry said in Seattle May 27. "We cannot continue this Administration's kid-glove approach to the supply and laundering of terrorist money ... I will launch a 'name and shame' campaign against those that are financing terror. And if they do not respond, they will be shut out of the U.S. financial system. The same goes for Saudi sponsorship of clerics who promote the ideology of Islamic terror. To put it simply, we will not do business as usual with Saudi Arabia." ( http://www.johnkerrx.com )

Nor did Kerry stop with Saudi Arabia, or the usual targets like Iran and North Korea (see his New York Times interview of May 28). His foreign policy speeches, all built around the danger of nuclear terrorism, were replete with threats against India, Pakistan, China and Russia -- some very formidable powers which even the Bush neocons had shied away from. Kerry was blunt about US pretensions to exercise custody over Russia's nuclear deterrent: "More than a decade has passed since the Berlin Wall came down. But Russia still has nearly 20,000 nuclear weapons, and enough nuclear material to produce 50,000 more Hiroshima- sized bombs. For most of these weapons and materials, cooperative security upgrades have not been completed .. And at the current pace, it will take 13 years to secure potential bomb material in the former Soviet Union. We cannot wait that long. 1 will ensure that we remove this material entirely from sites that can't be adequately secured during my first term ... It is hard to believe that we actually secured less bomb making material in the two years after 9/11 than we had in the two years before. At my first summit with the Russian President, I will seek an agreement to sweep aside the key obstacles slowing our efforts to secure Russia's nuclear stockpiles."

The North Korean crisis, with its alleged nuclear proliferation dangers, was largely manufactured by the US as a means of dragooning South Korean and Japanese support during the preparations for the US invasion of Iraq. Here Kerry again offered a more strident version of the Bush-Cheney line: "In East Asia, North Korea poses a genuine nuclear threat, while we have begun to strip American troops to relieve the overburdened forces in Iraq," he said in Seattle May 27. "This Administration has been fixated on Iraq while the nuclear dangers from North Korea have multiplied," Kerry said in Palm Beach June 1. "We know that North Korea has sold ballistic missiles and technology in the past. And according to published reports, North Korean uranium ended up in Libyan hands. The North Koreans have made it clear to the world -- and to the terrorists -- that they are open for business and will sell to the highest bidder. We should have no illusions about Kim Jong-il, so any agreement must have rigorous verification and lead to complete and irreversible elimination of North Korea's nuclear weapons program. For eighteen months, we've negotiated over the shape of the table while the North Koreans allegedly have made enough new fuel to make six to nine nuclear bombs." On June 1, Kerry also attacked China, India, Pakistan, and Iran as places which must show greater cooperation with international controls over all nuclear materials.

In the midst of his relentless evocation of the looming threat of nuclear terrorism, Kerry also embraced the Bush-Cheney preventive war doctrine: "This strategy focuses not only on what we must do, but on what we must prevent," Kerry said May 27 in Seattle. "We must ensure that lawless states and terrorists will not be armed with weapons of mass destruction. This is the single gravest threat to our security. Any potential adversary should know that we will defend ourselves against the possibility of attack by unconventional arms. If such a strike does occur, as commander-in-chief, I will respond with overwhelming and devastating force. If such an attack appears imminent, as commander-in-chief, I will do whatever is necessary to stop it. And, as commander-in-chief, I will never cede our security to anyone." ( http://www.johnkerry.com ) Many Democrats opposed this trigger-happy approach, and these remarks by Kerry took "him close to Mr . Bush's preemption doctrine," as a Washington Post editorial pointed out on May 30.

The key proposal of Kerry's nightmarish foreign policy tour also involved nuclear terrorism. Kerry on June 1 in affluent Palm Beach announced that he would appoint a national "nuclear terror" czar if elected. "So let it be clear: finally and fundamentally, preventing nuclear terrorism is our most urgent priority to provide for America's long- term security," he said. "That is why I will appoint a National Coordinator for Nuclear Terrorism and Counterproliferation who will work with me in the White House to marshal every effort and every ally, to combat an incalculable danger. We have to do everything we can to stop a nuclear weapon from ever reaching our shore -- and that mission begins far away. We have to secure nuclear weapons and materials at the source so that searching the containers here at the Port of Palm Beach isn't our only line of defense -- it is our last line of defense." (http://www.johnkerry.com)

No matter how far Kerry might go in attempting to outflank Bush on the right, he could not change the fact that, as long as there are elections, the Democratic Party will always have to ask for some meager concessions for the blacks, women, trade unionists, teachers, environmentalists, and lawyers who are important components of its base. But these groups were all slated for marginalization in the post-coup environment, and the Bush regime was a more attractive vehicle for administering martial law than the Democratic Party ever could ever be.

PREPARATION FOR EMERGENCY RULE

On May 11-12, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) ran a large-scale exercise involving more than 2,500 federal employees to determine how the federal government could continue operating in the face of a massive terrorist attack or other catastrophe. The government employees went to more than 100 secret sites, as part of a training exercise to prepare them to operate under catastrophic conditions. The exercise, called "Forward Challenge '04," was in preparation for over a year, according to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, who spoke to reporters from an undisclosed location. (Washington Post, May 14, 2004) Ridge had been hyping the "perfect storm" of coming terror in his own way for many weeks. Speaking at an event in Las Vegas in mid- April, Ridge said the government must "ratchet up" security from now through the 2005 inauguration, not based on "specific or credible intelligence" but rather on suspicion that high-profile political, economic and athletic events were good targets. (USA Today, 20 Apri1 2004)

There was also an intensive pattern of incidents pointing in the direction of a terrorist attack on rail systems, on the Madrid model. This pattern included suspicious activity in the Northeast rail corridor between Washington and Boston. A Philadelphia television station reported the discovery of a wireless transmitter carefully hidden in the gravel along the SEPTA (Southeast Pennsylvania Transit Authority) rail tracks in Philadelphia. An infrared sensor, painted black and buried in the trackside ballast, was found along the SEPTA tracks, which could be used as a triggering device. It sent a signal when a moving object crossed its infrared beam. (WPVI News, Philadelphia, May 20, 2004)

On May 6, British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that the new head of the British intelligence service MI-6 would be John Scarlett. The choice immediately caused protests from British political opposition leaders. Scarlett was the author and stubborn defender of the now discredited and artificially sexed-up Iraqi WMD report issued by the Blair government in support of the US-UK war drive. Dr. David Kelley lost his life in the scandal that developed around the manipulations in this report, but the role of the government was whitewashed in the inquiry conducted by Lord Hutton of the Law Lords.

This appointment meant that MI-6 would lack the leadership of a competent and independent professional who might act to prevent the coming terrorism, and would instead be under the domination of a political hack of dubious judgment and loyalty. (AP, May 6, 2004)

This problem was compounded by Bush's nomination of the blueblood Porter Goss to replace Tenet as head of the CIA. Goss had most recently been a member of Congress for Florida, but he was also a former CIA agent. In 1961, as a new CIA recruit, Goss had joined the staff of JM/WAVE, the CIA's Miami station. At one time the station chief was Theodore G. Shackley, an ally of the Bush machine and a kingpin of the CIA old boy networks. In those days, this was the command center for the anti-Castro Cubans who took part in the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. It was also the center of Operation Mongoose, which was officially an operation to assassinate Castro, but which was used as a cover for aspects of the Kennedy assassination. The JM/WAVE milieu produced a number of the Watergate burglars, and was later a center for Iran-contra drug- unning and gun-running. Finally, as we have seen, the JM/WAVE Iran-contra era infrastructure provided the vivarium for Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah, the three accused 9/11 pilots.

In addition, the US government appeared to have imposed an embargo on the sharing of critical anti-terror intelligence with European authorities. Whatever the intent, the net effect of this blackout was to screen certain activities in the US from scrutiny by the allies. In an article published May 6 the German economic paper Handelsblatt reported, in reference to a similar article which appeared in the Wall Street Journal, that Spanish investigators, like many of their colleagues in Europe, were finding it very difficult to obtain information from US circles which are engaged in the fight against terrorism. Mentioned was the case of Spanish Judge Balthazar Garzon who reportedly was unable to proceed with certain investigations on Al-Qaeda after Sept 11th, like the case of Al- Qaeda member Ramzi Binalshibh, who was imprisoned in an unknown location. The problem was compounded by the fact that the alleged anti-terrorism fight in the US was being conducted by non-public military courts and military intelligence, neither of which was sharing testimony and evidence with their European colleagues. (Handelsblatt, May 6; 2004)

AN ORGY OF TERROR PROPAGANDA

The possibility of portable nuclear weapons being used against US cities was prepared by a lengthy campaign of movies and news reports. In early 2004 the Arabic-language newspaper al-Hayat reported that Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda had acquired Soviet- built tactical nuclear weapons from Ukraine, and had stored them in safe places for future use. According to a February 8, 2004 Reuters account, "after the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, a former Russian National Security adviser, Gen. Alexander Lebed, said that up to 100 portable suitcase-sized bombs were unaccounted for. Moscow has denied such weapons existed." But Lebed "said each one was equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT and could kill as many as 100,000 people." The bombs were allegedly sold to Al-Qaeda when Ukrainian scientists visited the Afghan city of Kandahar in 1998, during the time of the Taliban regime, which the US says harbored Al- Qaeda. Another variant involved the activities Dr. A. Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program, who was alleged to have sold nuclear weapons technology, know-how, and equipment to all comers until his activities were exposed.

Yet another variation involved Iran, against which country the neocons, notably Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, have never stopped inveighing. During the recent Hamburg, Germany trial of Abdel-Ghani Mzoudi (subsequently acquitted on charges of complicity in the 9/11 attacks), a statement was introduced into evidence by an unidentified informer of the Bundeskriminalamt who alleged that Iranian intelligence was the actual initiator of the 9/11 attacks. The statement came from an alleged Iranian defector who had supposedly fled from Iran in July 2001. According to this source, "'Department 43 of Iranian intelligence was created to plan and conduct terror attacks, and mounted joint operations with Al-Qaeda. Osama Bin Laden's son, Sa ad Bin Laden, had made repeated consultative visits to Iran." (DPA, January 22, 2004).

Lurid accounts of coming ABC terrorist attacks proliferated in the US media. Whatever the subjective intentions or motivations of the authors, these accounts objectively served as propaganda preparation for terror attacks, specifically by introducing to the US public the alien notions of emergency rule, martial law, and the state of siege, all of which were favorite themes of neocon writers going back to the Nazi Carl Schmitt. A particularly fulsome example was the article by Michael Ignatieff which appeared on May 2, 2004 in the New York Times Magazine. Ignatieff raved:

Consider the consequences of a second major attack on the mainland United States - the detonation of a radiological or dirty bomb, perhaps, or a low-yield nuclear device or a chemical strike in a subway. Any of these events could cause death, devastation and panic on a scale that would make 9/11 seem like a pale prelude. After such an attack, a pall of mourning, melancholy, anger and fear would hang over our public life for a generation.

An attack of this sort is already in the realm of possibility. The recipes for making ultimate weapons are on the Internet, and the materiel required is available for the right price. Democracies live by free markets, but a free market in everything -- enriched uranium, ricin, anthrax -- will mean the death of democracy. Armageddon is being privatized, and unless we shut down these markets, doomsday will be for sale. Sept. 11, for all its horror, was a conventional attack. We have the best of reasons to fear the fire next time.

A democracy can allow its leaders one fatal mistake -- and that's what 9/11 looks like to many observers -- but Americans will not forgive a second one. A succession of large-scale attacks would pull at the already-fragile tissue of trust that binds us to our leadership and destroy the trust we have in one another. Once the zones of devastation were cordoned off and the bodies buried, we might find ourselves, in short order, living in a national-security state on continuous alert, with sealed borders, constant identity checks and permanent detention camps for dissidents and aliens. Our constitutional rights might disappear from our courts, while torture might reappear in our interrogation cells. The worst of it is that government would not have to impose tyranny on a cowed populace. We would demand it for our own protection. And if the institutions of our democracy were unable to protect us from our enemies, we might go even further, taking the law into our own hands. We have a history of lynching in this country, and by the time fear and paranoia settled deep in our bones, we might repeat the worst episodes from our past, killing our former neighbors, our onetime friends -- (emphasis added)


The coming of martial law to the US in the wake of a new large-scale terror attack was also the theme of Ted Koppel's Nightline broadcast of April 7, 2004. Here Koppel was joined by former terror czar Richard Clarke and the Reagan White House chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein. The broadcast was titled "The Armageddon Plan," and featured questions of continuity in government (COG) after an attack that had decimated the US Congress. Koppel asked Duberstein: "Aren't we left for at least the foreseeable future with some sort of martial law anyway? "Duberstein eagerly replied: "You have to suspend rights." Koppel elaborated: "And during that period, then, and given the sense of panic that is inevitable under circumstances like this, the executive branch of government takes on extraordinary power, doesn't it?" Clarke chimed in: "I think in any war where Washington were destroyed, inevitably, there would be a period of, for lack of a better term, something like martial law." (Nightline, April 7, 2004)

No terrorist attack would be complete without the advance airing of a scenario docudrama to provide the population with a conceptual scheme to help them understand the coming events in the sense intended by the oligarchy. For any and all future attacks, this detail was attended to on Sunday June 6, 2004 at 8 PM EDT, when FX cable network broadcast Meltdown: The Threat is Real, a 2004 docudrama produced by Craig Anderson Productions and Apolloscreen. This 2- hour scenario drama starred Bruce Greenwood and Arnold Vosloo. The plot summary: "Government agencies and civilians respond to a terrorist attack on an American nuclear reactor." Subtext: "Terrorists didn't have to build a nuclear weapon ... we built it for them." The blurb also showed dark figures with rocket- propelled grenades advancing towards two nuclear cooling towers, while other terrorists parachuted in from above."

Other commentators cynically discussed the coming terror assault in direct relation to the November presidential elections. A May 2 article by New York Times correspondent David Sanger entitled "Calculating the Politics of Catastrophe" summarized the pattern of "obsessive" discussion in Washington circles about the electoral impact of another terror attack on the US. According to Sanger, both the Bush and Kerry campaigns were weighing the impact of a "nightmarish, unpredictable event" that could shift the election. Bush, he noted, had begun to talk more openly about such an event, "perhaps to brace the country for the worst, perhaps to begin the political inoculation if domestic defenses fail." Bush insiders were reportedly most concerned, not about the lives of the innocent victims, but rather about the possibility that a new terror attack might boomerang against the current tenant of the White House. Their cynical calculations were compared to "a kind of macabre game theory in which security experts and political operatives -- two classes of people who typically do not interact much in Washington -- are calculating what the political fallout of an attack might be." Sanger quoted a senior administration official as saying, "The message the terrorists learned in Madrid is that attacks can change elections and change policy. It's a very dangerous precedent to have out there." Noting the standard US neocon line of denouncing the Spanish population for learning the "wrong lesson" from the terrorist attacks and for "appeasing" terrorism, Sanger went on to point out that the Bush administration was busy preparing scenarios on the ways a terrorist attack could "change elections" in the US in Bush's favor. Sanger wrote: "Mr. Bush's political aides -- speaking only on background, because no one dissects terror on the record -- argue that the crazier the world gets, the more it plays to the theme of the campaign: Now more than ever, the country needs a president who has proved to be strong on terror." The main issue, the Bush backers agreed, was not prevention, but timing: if the terror attacks came too far in advance of the elections, the initial impulse to rally around the President might dissipate, "because the shock value would be gone, and because this time American defenses are supposed to be up. So within a month or so, the thinking goes, horror could give way to analysis about whether the billions spent on security were well spent -- and if Mr. Bush focused on the right threats." Thus, a terror attack in June or July might backfire on Bush. "One reason the administration is so obsessed with security for the conventions," wrote Sanger, "is that those gatherings attract large concentrations of the American elite in two major cities. But they also may be sufficiently far ahead of the election to allow time for predictable finger-pointing. Terrorists, some believe, might try to undertake an attack that could be credibly portrayed as a result of the Iraq war, rather than as a 9/11 replay." Sanger did not mention the scenario that built on the lessons of Aznar's fall: martial law, emergency rule, and no elections at all.

In a May 20, 2004 op-ed entitled "Beware of any stretch-run surprises," the Wall Street Journal's Al Hunt forecast that the presidential contest could be determined by "unanticipated events." Chief among these was a terrorist attack. Hunt noted the hypocrisy of the Bush line on terror: "The Bush administration and outside terrorist experts repeatedly have cautioned that another attack on the homeland is likely. The White House, politically, had it both ways: taking credit for avoiding any assault since 9/11, while at the same time warning that another was likely, even inevitable." GOP leaders are betting that a new terror wave will play in to their hands; Hunt cited veteran Republican operative Charles Black as stating that "my instinct is there likely will be a rally around the incumbent effect" in the event of a new round of terror. From here it was not far to the conclusion that some really serious terror might also allow Bush to dispense with the election formalities altogether, and enjoy enhanced public support while doing so.

The scurrilous television personality Shawn Hannity blurted out the entire scenario when he blabbered: "If we are attacked before our election like Spain was, I am not so sure that we should go ahead with the election ... we had better make plans now because it's going to happen." Hannity was close to advocating the violent overthrow of the US Constitution.

The Washington Post used the release of the latest set of Nixon administration tapes to issue what can only be interpreted as a threat to the Congress in the form of a signal piece bearing the headline "Haig Said Nixon Joked of Nuking Hill." The content involved a telephone conversation between Nixon's then Chief of Staff, Gen. Alexander Haig, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in March 1974 -- months before Nixon was forced out of office. "I was told to get the football," reported Haig to Kissinger, a reference to the codes used by the president to order nuclear attacks. In response to a question from Kissinger, Haig specified that the request is for "His nuclear black bag. He is going to drop it on the Hill." The context is Nixon's growing fear of his own looming impeachment. This item could not have been reassuring to members of Congress. (Washington Post, May 27, 2004)

THE ANGLO-AMERICAN EMPIRE IN BREAKDOWN CRISIS

The grounds for the wave of terror propaganda were to be found in the stunning reverses suffered by the Bush regime over the first half of 2004. During April, Iraqi resistance forces initiated a national uprising against the invasion of their country. The failure of the vaunted US military machine before Fallujah and Najaf ended the myth of US superpower invincibility, and set off uncontrollable processes of disintegration throughout the global system. During May, the war crimes and atrocities carried out by US, UK and other coalition forces in Iraq wrecked the moral credibility of the United States and its allies, making these aggressive powers into an object of absolute execration around the world. This situation was encapsulated in the stern condemnation of Bush's policies delivered during his June 4 visit to the Vatican by Pope John Paul II. The ad hoc "Coalition of the Willing" assembled by the Bush regime had begun to disintegrate, with Spain, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Kazakhstan, Norway, and the Philippines either leaving Iraq or announcing their departure. Governments subservient to Bush in Great Britain, Italy, Poland, Denmark, and other countries were facing a grim electoral future. The entire alliance system created by the US at the end of World War II was increasingly a dead letter. The three principal leaders of world aggression, Bush, Blair, and Sharon, were engulfed by domestic political crises threatening them with ouster over the short term, with increased danger of prosecution and the wrecking of their political machines amidst recrimination for Iraq and other disasters. Concomitantly with these events, the New York-London financial system began to exhibit symptoms of severe instability leading to systemic crisis. The US was running a merchandise trade deficit of over $500 billion, and a federal budget deficit which actually approaches $750 billion. The US was a bankrupt state. Greenspan's policies had solved the dot com bubble by creating a housing bubble and a bond bubble. Because of the manifest bankruptcy of the United States, the Anglo-American finance oligarchs feared the termination of the US dollar as a reserve currency. This would take the form of a dumping of the dollar as the currency in which the posted price of oil is expressed by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia, and other OPEC states. The far stronger and more stable euro would be the beneficiary of these moves, and it is the euro which would prove to be far more attractive to most countries in a world divided into currency blocks. The European Union had been pressing Russia to accept payment for oil in euros, which, if accomplished, would place the EU out of reach of Anglo-American and Israeli blackmail threats of oil shortages. Russia and Germany in particular were actively discussing this measure, which harks back to the post- World War I Russo-German Apollo agreements, a nightmare for the Anglo-Americans. Taken together, these developments suggested the collapse of the entire US imperialist system. The protagonists of the coming terror were determined to disrupt these processes, imposing on the world a regime of unilateral US diktat and military intervention, with a domestic police state to make sure that no opposition emerged on the home front.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:46 am

PART 2 OF 3 (CH. 16 CONT'D.)

THE NEOCONS UNDER ATTACK

The neocons were deeply concerned about their own personal fate. During their ascent, this exceptionally ideological and close-knit faction had by its arrogance and incompetence made many enemies. During May, there were repeated editorial calls for the firing of not just Rumsfeld, but also of Wolfowitz and the other neocons who had made such a mess of the Pentagon. The demand to oust Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz was raised by the veteran Republican Senators who exercised great authority within that party. Right-wing columnist Robert Novak, in a Washington Post op-ed on the Chalabi scandal, commented: "Republican Senators, who do not yet want to be quoted by name, feel there must be some accountability for this massive blunder, as there must be for the prisoner abuse scandal. They want the President at least to consider" firing Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and perhaps others of the neo-con gang. The senior Republican Congressional leaders were backed in this, by high U.S. military brass. (Time, May 25, New York Times May 24, 2004) According to press accounts, Senators Warner and McCain led a group of about a dozen senior GOP leaders who called on Bush to demand the sacking of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz as a matter of urgent political expediency. Bush reportedly sat stony-faced and said nothing.

The May 20 US military/mercenary raid against the Baghdad offices of Ahmed Chalabi pointed to a new and grave danger for many top Bush administration and neocon figures. Chalabi was of course the darling of the neocons, who had channeled upwards of $40 million in official US government funding to him. He was the source of fantastic reports of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and of the eagerness of the Iraqi masses to rise up in revolt against Saddam Hussein. It now turned out that Chalabi had betrayed a vital US state secret to his patrons in Iran by telling the Iranians that the US had broken the secret code used by Iranian diplomats and agents. This revelation alerted the Iranians to their vulnerability, and cut off a key means of US espionage against Iran and its partners. The question thus arose as to who in the US government could have given Chalabi such highly classified information, thus committing a very serious federal crime. Chalabi's closest contacts were known to have been Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and a few others. This issue became the subject of an FBI investigation of these and other top Bushmen. The information that Chalabi and his intelligence chief Aras Karim Habit were alleged to have passed to the government of Iran "was highly classified, and known only to a few in the U.S. government," wrote Time's Romesh Ratnesar. "The probe will examine whether U.S. officials illegally transmitted state secrets to the INC. The investigation could ultimately reach high-ranking civilian officials at the Pentagon and the Defense Intelligence Agency who had dealings with Chalabi and his organization." Ratnesar cited "a senior U.S. official" as his source. New York Times reporters David Johnston and Richard Oppel, Jr. also citing "government officials," called the information "so highly classified that federal investigators have intensified their inquiry to find out whether anyone in the American government gave the material to Mr. Chalabi." They also cited "intelligence officials" saying that the probe, by the FBI, centered on the handful of U.S. officials with regular contact with Chalabi in Washington, and an even smaller number who had access to the intelligence. "Most of them were at the Pentagon," they wrote; however, Chalabi himself, on "Meet the Press" on May 23, acknowledged three personal meetings with Vice President Cheney. Leading neocons not currently serving in government, such as Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, Kenneth Timmerman, and Laurie Mylroie, vociferously defended Chalabi. (Time, May 25, New York Times May 24, 2004)

There was also the special prosecutor investigating the leaking to Robert Novak of the fact that Valerie Plame, the wife of Bush critic Ambassador Joseph Wilson (who exposed the fraud of the Bush 2002 State of the Union charges that Iraq had sought uranium yellowcake in Niger) was working for the CIA. Prime suspects were Bush's political strategist Karl Rove, and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card. Revealing the identity of a CIA agent is a serious felony under federal law.

Allegedly in regard to the Valerie Plame leak investigation, Bush retained his own private attorney, Jim Sharp. Sharp had represented Gen. Richard Secord, yet another Iran-contra figure, who was accused of taking part in the illegal arms shipments of the mid-1980s. Cheney already had a private lawyer, Terrence O'Donnell of the Washington DC law firm Williams & Connelly. According to Capitol Hill Blue of June 3, sources familiar with the Federal investigation say that Bush knew about the Plame leak, and that he took no action to stop the release of Plame's name. This would make him accessory to a serious federal crime.

At the root of the Valerie Plame affair was the role of her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, in refuting the baseless claim that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger. This fake story was buttressed by documents which turned out to be forged. Of interest in this regard was the neocon ideologue Ledeen, because the faked documents first surfaced in Rome, where Ledeen possessed extensive contacts. A federal grand jury was formed to investigate this matter. Ledeen, like so many Bush officials, was an alumnus of the 1980s George H. W. Bush-Poindexter- Abrams-Oliver North Iran- contra gun-running and drug-running scandal, and mobilized these networks as part of the post 9/11 assault on Iraq. In December 2001, Ledeen moved to revive the Iran connection, setting up a meeting between two Pentagon civilian neo-cons and Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer whom the CIA called a criminal and liar. Three days of meetings in Rome involved Harold Rhode, Larry Franklin, Ghorbanifar, and two unnamed officials of the Iranian regime. After the conquest of Iraq, Rhode was sent to Baghdad as the contact point between the Office of Special Plans and Chalabi. Ghorbanifar, in a Dec. 22, 2003 interview with Newsweek's Mark Hosenball, reported that he maintained contact with Rhode and Franklin "five or six times a week" through June 2003, when he had a second meeting with Rhode in Paris. This back channel to the Iranians came under intense scrutiny.

Richard Perle was the target of a huge civil suit growing out of his alleged involvement in the fraudulent conveyances and embezzlement carried out by the neocon press baron and moneybags Lord Conrad Black, who may have taken money from Hollinger to help fund neocon think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute. Perle had worked closely with the purloining Lord in recent years, and might also face criminal charges in this case. A report prepared for the Hollinger board by Richard C. Breeden, a former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, called on Perle to give back $5.4 million to Hollinger. (Washington Post, September 1, 2004)

Retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern warned that the allegedly "credible intelligence" cited by Ashcroft in his warning that Al-Qaeda is preparing to "hit the United States" was most likely yet another fabrication. "'Intelligence is being conjured up once again to serve the political purposes of the Bush administration," McGovern wrote. According to McGovern, "the President, Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, et al. have a deeply personal incentive to make four more years for Bush a sure thing." McGovern noted that according to a memo issued by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales on January 25, administration officials might be prosecuted for "war crimes" because of the treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan. Gonzales stressed that "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions are war crimes under U.S. law, and added: "It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges" based on the War Crimes Act passed by Congress in 1996. Gonzales urged Bush to declare that the Geneva Convention regarding prisoners of war does not apply to Taliban or Al-Qaeda detainees, and that such a determination "would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution." And all that, McGovern notes, was before the Abu Ghraib revelations. McGovern continued:

For the Bush administration, the nightmare is losing the November election -- a prospect believed to be unlikely until just recently. For many of us citizens, the nightmare is the President and his associates resorting to extra-legal measures to ensure that there is no regime change in Washington for four more years ... Yes, this could mean a constitutional crisis without parallel in the history of our country .... But was there not a good warm-up in the fall of 2002? Did we not then experience a constitutional crisis when Congress was duped into ceding to the President its constitutional power to declare war? And it was all accomplished by spreading the myth that Saddam Hussein was close to exploding a mushroom cloud over us -- a myth based on a known forgery alleging that Iraq was acquiring uranium from Africa. Could an elevated threat level be used as a means of justifying martial law and postponement of the election? No doubt such suggestions will seem too alarmist to those trusting that there is a moral line, somewhere, that the President and his senior advisers would not cross. I regret very much to say that their behavior over the past three years leaves me doubtful that there is such a line .... If my doubts are justified, the sooner we all come to grips with this parlous situation the better. (Ray McGovern syndicated column, June 1; Common Dreams, June 2, 2004)


In an interview with Amy Goodman's Democracy Now radio program, McGovern commented on the significance of Bush's retaining an attorney. Among the things on Bush's mind, McGovern repeated, is that he might be facing a war crimes prosecution if voted out of office. Another issue for Bush, according to McGovern, is that "four more years becomes even more important to me and Ashcroft and Rumsfeld," because of the war crimes indictments hanging over their heads. McGovern: "I say this, because I am more frightened now than at any time over the last three and a half years, that this administration will resort to extra-legal methods, to do something to ensure that there are four more years for George Bush." (Democracy Now, June 4, 2004)

On June 3, CIA Director George Tenet announced his resignation, and was quickly joined by the CIA Deputy Director of Operations, James L. Pavitt, the spymaster of clandestine services. Tenet was evidently forced out by Bush and Cheney, but was willing to portray his own dismissal as a resignation for family reasons, mainly his desire to spend more time with his adolescent son. Tenet, as a Clinton holdover, was not a doctrinaire Straussian or Skull & Bones member, and thus was not and could never be a member of the Bush/neocon core group. For many weeks, neocons like Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, James Woolsey, Newt Gingrich and others had been attempting to scapegoat Tenet for the US disasters in Iraq and elsewhere. Tenet did of course preside over 9/11 and the Iraq invasion, which established a prima facie case of his incompetence (or complicity). His departure allowed Bush to claim that there was some accountability in the current administration. More germane to the issue of the coming terrorism, Tenet was so discredited as to have become a controversial symbol of the failure of the Bush administration to defend the US. In a speech the previous week, even Tenet's friend Al Gore had demanded his resignation. With Tenet still in office, a coming terror event might have given rise to a wave of accusation and resentment against a CIA Director who by that time would have failed in warding off not only 9/11, but also whatever the second wave had to offer.

In the immediate aftermath of the Tenet ouster, the neocon gang appeared to have gained a monetary respite. Douglas Jehl of The New York Times reported on June 5 that the simultaneous departure of Tenet and Pavitt has shifted the balance of power within the US intelligence community in favor of the Pentagon neocons. Jehl writes that "Without Mr. Tenet in place, the power balance in a rivalry between the CIA and the Defense Department may tilt more toward Stephen Cambone." Jehl attributed this view to "Congressional officials." (NYT, 5 June 2004)

In the wake of the Tenet resignation, indications began to surface that the mental disintegration of "dry drunk" Bush had gone farther than usually surmised. Doug Thompson of Capitol Hill Blue wrote: "President George W. Bush's increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader's state of mind. In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as "enemies of the state ..." The President's abrupt dismissal of CIA Director George Tenet Wednesday night is, aides say, an example of how he works. "Tenet wanted to quit last year but the President got his back up and wouldn't hear of it," says an aide. "That would have been the opportune time to make a change, not in the middle of an election campaign but when the director challenged the President during the meeting Wednesday, the President cut him off by saying 'That's it, George. I cannot abide disloyalty. I want your resignation and I want it now."' Tenet was allowed to resign "voluntarily" and Bush informed his shocked staff of the decision Thursday morning. One aide says the President actually described the decision as "God's will." (Capitol Hill Blue, 4 June 2004) Perhaps the tenant of the White House needed to get his thyroid checked.

COUNTERVAILING TENDENCIES?

By summer 2004, the situation of the party of terrorism inside the United States was uncertain. The political leaders who would be the beneficiaries of new terror attacks were figures like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft, Ridge, and the neocon Gestapo (as Colin Powell calls it) in general. The main agencies for their dictatorship would be FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), Ridge's Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the FBI. The US military, especially the US Army, had become profoundly disillusioned with the Bush-Cheney preventive war policy. They also resented being scapegoated for the Abu Graib atrocities, which were ordered by CIA, DIA, and Cheney's mercenary contractors. Some generals realized that a successful terror coup, which would have had the result of cementing the current gang in power for the foreseeable future -- without benefit of checks and balances -- would guarantee that US forces would be fed into meatgrinders far worse than Iraq. In addition to Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba, a post-coup US regime could not avoid collision with China and/or Russia. It remained to be seen whether this awareness would be enough to motivate the US military to do something to stop such a coup. Similar considerations apply to the State Department, which had virtually no place in the post- coup world eagerly planned by the neocons. Incredibly, the Congress was conniving in its own liquidation with a bill ordering instant elections to replace deceased Congressmen, which passed the House.

Sidney Blumenthal, a former advisor to the Clinton Administration working with Salon.com, wrote a piece in the Guardian on how the U.S. officer corps had turned against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The piece, was headlined "America's Military Coup." Retired General William Odom, who was the head of the National Security Agency, the main US electronic spying center, and who had moved to the Hudson Institute, was quoted saying: "It was never in our interest to go into Iraq. It is a diversion from the war on terrorism; the rationale for the Iraq war (finding WMD) is phony; the US army is overstretched and being driven into the ground; and the prospect of building a democracy is zero. In Iraqi politics legitimacy is going to be tied to expelling us. Wisdom in military affairs dictates withdrawal in this situation. We can't afford to fail -- that's mindless. The issue is how we stop failing more. I am arguing a strategic decision." Another military figure told Blumenthal that Rumsfeld was "detested" and that "if there's a sentiment in the army it is: support our troops, impeach Rumsfeld." Blumenthal then referenced an essay by Lt. Col. Charles Dunlap which had received a prize in 1992 from then General Colin Powell. The title of the piece was "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012," which was a cautionary tale of how the U.S.. military launched a coup because of the failures of the civilian government. (Guardian, May 13, 2004) Former CENTCOM commanders Zinni and Hoar also published attacks on the Rumsfeld- olfowitz policies. One account suggested that, given the degree of military hatred against the administration, any other country would have already witnessed a military coup.

Ashcroft had claimed that just after the Madrid bombing, an Al-Qaeda spokesman had announced that "90 percent of the arrangements for an attack in the United States were complete." But Newsweek terrorism writers Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball pointed out that the only known basis for Ashcroft's claim was a note sent to a London Arabic newspaper immediately after the Madrid bombing, which said that a major attack against the United States was "90 percent ready." The authenticity of this report was questioned at the time by some U.S. officials. (Newsweek web exclusive, May 26, 2004

TERRORIZING THE CONGRESS

On June 9, the US Capitol, including Congress and the Supreme Court, was evacuated in panic because of a report that an airplane without a transponder was approaching Washington DC. The plane turned out to belong to the Governor Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky, who was coming to attend the funeral of former President Reagan, but authorities appear to have used this incident to terrorize the Congress in an unprecedented manner. Photographers, Secret Service agents and members of a military choir were finishing preparations for the Rotunda ceremony when Capitol Police suddenly burst in, shouting: "Evacuate the building now! Now! Move! Move!" Congressmen, senators, and staff members ran like rabbits as police officers shouted "This is not a drill!" Some jettisoned briefcases and laptops, and women flung off high heels. Amy Call, a spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, reported that police had told people to "run, get out of the Capitol," because of the "imminent" approach of an airplane. Nearby, on the Mall, U.S. Park Police and Capitol Police also ordered people to flee. "Do not stop," officers yelled. "Keep moving." "Ladies and gentlemen, let's move like our lives depend on it. I mean it!" a D.C. police officer shouted. F-16 fighter jets and Black Hawk helicopters were sent to intercept the errant twin-engine turboprop plane. The plane's transponder, which signals its identifying information to ground controllers, was broken, Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, told the press later. (Washington Post, June 10, 2004)

The July 4 Independence Day holiday was marked by a pattern of hysterical terror propaganda in the US mass media. Part of this was the publicity campaign around the new book, Imperial Hubris, about to be published by Brassey's, which was attributed to Anonymous, a currently serving officer of the CIA whose real name was allegedly Michael Scheuer. Anonymous was said to have been the first leader of the CIA's Osama Bin Laden station during the mid-1990s, which did not inspire confidence. At the center of the hype over this book, pushed by CNN's David Ensor and others, was the assurance that an ABC terror attack on the US was imminent. The New York Times of June 23 quoted Anonymous as having "a pressing certainty that Al Qaeda will attack the continental United States again, that its next strike will be more damaging than that of 11 September 2001, and could include use of weapons of mass destruction." Anonymous openly lionized Bin Laden, saying that Bin Laden's vast accomplishments were due to the fact that he actually believed deeply in something. Anonymous, following the line of Richard Clarke, was highly critical of the Bush regime for having deviated from the true existential world struggle against al Qaeda: "There is nothing that bin Laden could have hoped for more than the American invasion of Iraq," wrote Anonymous, who described Bush as al Qaeda's ideal American president. What emerged from the Clarke and Anonymous volumes taken together was a growing recognition in US ruling circles that the Iraq adventure had long since crossed the line into irrevocable disaster. Their concern was therefore to safeguard oligarchical rule post-Iraq. To obtain this, they were more than willing to jettison the pathetically incompetent Bush regime and its phalanx of discredited neocon ideologues. But Clarke and Anonymous were both the type of bureaucrat who could expect to enjoy vastly increased power under martial law. The Clarke-Anonymous attempt was therefore to preserve false-flag terrorism in the guise of al Qaeda as the indispensable means of social control for the indefinite future. In this regard they appeared more than willing to tolerate a new round of ABC/WMD terrorism to make sure that the terror card remained available, since they evidently could see no other way of maintaining the current system.

Even more explicit was the book Osama's Revenge, whose author, the "former FBI consultant" Paul L. Williams, was publicized by Fox News on June 28, 2004. According to Williams, Osama Bin Laden already had 20 Soviet-made suitcase bombs, and these weapons were already in the United States! Williams estimated al Qaeda's strength in this country at about 5,000 sleeper agents ready for action. He also cited a warning that New York City was a nuclear target which was allegedly given by Tenet to Bush in October 2001, but never communicated to Mayor Giuliani.

To organize the terror drumbeat more effectively, the Bush White House was known to fax inflammatory and apocalyptic talking points on terrorism to its phalanx of reactionary talk show hosts. On June 24 at 2:25 PM on Fox News, the "terrorist and security expert" Harvey Kushner opined that al Qaeda is certain to attack the United States during the summer. On June 30 at 4:55 PM, Col. Oliver North (sitting in for the vacationing neofascist syndicated radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh) announced that the lesson of Madrid was that there was sure to be a large-scale terror attack in the US before the November elections.

CALLING OFF THE ELECTIONS

At this time, the Bush regime also openly broached the question of calling off the November presidential election, something that had not been done in the midst of real shooting wars in 1864 and 1944. According to Newsweek, DeForest Soaries, the chairman of the US Election Assistance Commission, had asked Ridge to urge Congress to pass legislation giving the government power to cancel or reschedule a federal election. Soaries noted that New York City had suspended its primary elections on the day of the Sept. 11 attacks, but the federal government did not possess that authority.

Ironically, the US Election Assistance Commission was a new agency which had been created in the wake of the 2000 election fiasco. Left liberals were disturbed; The Nation published a parody of a future Bush speech announcing there would be no vote.

This first wave of Bush-inspired election cancellation propaganda peaked in mid-July 2004. At this point neocon ideologue Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute proposed the creation of a kind of committee of public safety of top-level oligarchs who would have the function of calling off elections. According to Ornstein,

Congress should pass a law creating a blue-ribbon commission to which it would delegate the authority to make decisions about postponement of presidential and congressional elections in the aftermath of a terrorist attack or major natural disaster. The commission should consist of people with high profiles and impeccable reputations for integrity, and include some people with experience in election administration. From the public sector, the kinds of people to consider would include former senators such as Warren Rudman and Alan Simpson; former representatives such as Tom Foley, Lee Hamilton, Bob Walker and John Brademas; former Cabinet members such as Lynn Martin and Donna Shalala; and leaders of business, labor and higher education who have comparable reputations and public profiles .... The commission would function only if a disaster triggered the need for a decision, and it would operate under a specific set of directives that would make a decision to postpone any election, in whole or in part, the last recourse. Such a decision should be made only through broad consensus, requiring a two-thirds vote by the commission. (Washington Post, July 16, 2004)


With all the arid banality of the true neocon, Ornstein did not face the fact that his new oligarchical commission would in effect have become the supreme governing authority of the United States, although he is probably aware of this. Ornstein's proposal amounted to subverting the constitution while granting dictatorial power to the discredited hacks who bore much of the responsibility for the country's predicament, be it through their sins of omission or of commission.

As the presidential campaign unfolded, the Bush campaign showed a cynical willingness to use terror threats and terror demagogy as a kind of political auxiliary to their efforts. During the days just after Kerry had announced his choice of Senator Edwards as his vice presidential candidate, the lugubrious and plodding Tom Ridge of the Department of Homeland Security called a press conference to announce that there was a new, but wholly undefined, threat on the horizon. Ridge had obviously taken over the ministry of fear portfolio from Ashcroft, who was too widely hated and too discredited to be effective. Ridge's remarks were clearly aimed at chopping off the Edwards bounce for the Democrats. Some Democrats grumbled.

The Democratic National Convention ended in Boston on Thursday, July 29. Here again, a modest five-point pop in the polls for Kerry was observable. But on the afternoon of Sunday, August 1, it was Ridge's turn once again, this time with a litany of threats against the IMF and World Bank in Washington DC, against Prudential in Newark, and against the New York Stock Exchange and Citibank in Manhattan. It was Howard Dean who spoke up with refreshing candor, pointing to the obvious political motivation and political timing of the new wave of Bush terror demagogy. Speaking on CNN Late Edition, Dean said that he was "concerned that every time that something happens that's not good for President Bush, he plays his trump card, which is terrorism. His whole campaign is based on the notion that 'I can keep you safe, therefore, in times of difficulty in America, stick with me. "'

With that, Dean had confirmed his historical merit of being the only national politician willing to challenge the sanctimonious shibboleths of the new terror state. He was immediately taken to task by neocon Democrat Joe Lieberman, less a monotheist than a zealous adept of the cult of Deimos and Phobos, the gods of fear and terror. "That's outrageous," said Lieberman of the what was merely obvious. GOP Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority whip and apostle of venal election practice also criticized Dean. "I think that's the most cynical view," whined McConnell. "The president, after all, is the president, even if he's running for re-election." Dean courageously rejected the idea that he, Dean, was responsible for politicizing the terror threat, pointing out that it was Bush who had done this. "When you're going to run on inspiring fear in the American people, that's politics," Dean countered. "The president himself made the choice to inject politics into the campaign on terrorism. That was his choice. He's now going to have to live with the consequences." CNN later conducted a poll among its viewers to see how many thought that the new terror alert was a political stunt.

It soon became known that the allegedly urgent information upon which this orange alert was based was about four years old, and had just turned up in a computer captured in Pakistan. One thinks of Tony Blair's use of old term papers, Readers Digest articles, and messages found in hollow trees for his various imaginative and opportunistic dossiers. A senior law enforcement official told a reporter: "There is nothing right now that is new. Why did we go to this level? ... I still don't know that." (Washington Post, August 3, 2004)

On August 12, Kerry ventured to attack Bush for having dawdled with the second graders at the Booker School, listening to "My Pet Goat" while hundreds of Americans died. Responding to Kerry's attacks a day or two later, Bush claimed that he had been collecting his thoughts while he remained with the children, and even suggested that what he did in the first minutes was not important. "What is relevant," according to Bush, "is whether or not I understand and understood then the stakes .... And I made a determination that we would do everything we could to bring those killers to justice and to protect the American people." Bush told Larry King of CNN that "it's easy to second- guess a moment," said Bush; the important thing was that he quickly "recognized we were at war" and mobilized the nation for his series of wars. (Washington Post, August 13, 2004) Bush clearly wasted more than 15 minutes after the North Tower impact, and wasted another 7 minutes after the South Tower impact. In that time, he should have been issuing crisp orders to mobilize air defenses, deploy combat air patrols, cut through layers of bureaucracy, and generally administer a bureaucratic blow-torch to a corrupt and somnolent bureaucracy that was honeycombed with subversive moles. But Bush, who had been on vacation for much of his time in office before September 11, did none of these things. Bush nevertheless made his own supposed prowess on 9/11 the theme of the Republican National Convention at the end of August and the beginning of September.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:47 am

PART 3 OF 3 (CH. 16 CONT'D.)

LARRY FRANKLIN, MOSSAD, AND IRAN

As July turned into August, the visible emphasis shifted from terror and martial law towards a new war, this time with Iran. Naturally, war and terror were linked, as they always had been. On August 27, 2004 CBS News broke the story of an alleged Israeli mole in the Pentagon who had been passing US secrets to the Israeli Embassy by way of AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Council, a powerful arm of the Zionist lobby. Under investigation was Larry Franklin, a middle-level functionary working for the Wolfowitz-Feith-Luti-Shulsky clique in the Pentagon. The FBI was asking questions about Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, and David Wurmser, an Iran specialist working for Cheney. The general line of questioning about these figures was: "Do you believe certain people would spy for Israel and pass secret information?" (Washington Post, September 4, 2004)

This same Larry Franklin had been named in my June 6 news release, "Rogue Bush Backers Prepare Super 9/11 False Flag Terror Attacks. "Franklin was indicated as one of the vulnerable links in the neocon network which found itself in a hysterical flight forward to try to salvage the debacle of their Iraq war by expanding that war to neighboring countries, notably Iran. The threat of a new round of "own goal" synthetic terrorism, quite possibly in the ABC dimension, was linked to the preparation of that wider war. The logic at work was that of an "October surprise," this time on the scale adequate to shock the post 9/11 world.

The best working hypothesis to understand the Israeli mole investigation was that neocon networks in the Pentagon were very close to embroiling the United States in a war with Iran. This would likely come as an Israeli and/or US pre-emptive bombing attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, possibly combined with a terrorist attack inside the US using weapons of mass destruction, which the corporate controlled media would immediately blame on Iran.

Whatever forces were behind the naming of Franklin, it was safe to assume that their main aim was to break up neocon preparations for a surprise attack on Iran, which the neocons had been boasting about in the media with special emphasis for some weeks. Backing the Franklin probe were in all probability military factions who had no desire to be fed into the Iranian meatgrinder, and who did not fancy a neocon fascist dictatorship. The immediate goal was to knock Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Bolton, Rice, Abrams and their cheering section in the media and think-tanks onto the defensive. While the exposure of Franklin was a positive step, it was far from decisive, and the neocons still in a position to unleash the dogs of war, especially with the help of Sharon. The US was therefore not far from the brink of war with Iran, and at the same time was entering a period of steadily increasing danger of synthetic terrorism designed to steal or cancel the November elections, and thus freeze the current neocon clique in power for the foreseeable future.

IRAN: OCTOBER SURPRISE IN SEPTEMBER?

On August 19, Martin Sieff of UPI warned: "Forget an October Surprise, a much worse one could come in September: Full-scale war between the United States and Iran may be far closer than the American public might imagine." Sieff quoted remarks made by Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani on August 18 which bluntly warned that if Iranian military commanders believed the United States were serious about attacking Iran to destroy its nuclear power facility at Bushehr, or to topple its Islamic theocratic form of government, the Iranian military would not sit back passively and wait for the U.S. armed forces to strike the first blow, as President Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq did in March 2003. They would strike first. "We will not sit to wait for what others will do to us," Shamkhani told al-Jazeera. "Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly," he added. With this, the Iran-Iraq border became a flash point of hair-trigger confrontation in the restless war agitation of the neocons. Iranian General Yahya Rahim Safavi, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, said earlier in August: "If Israel should dare to strike our nuclear installations, we will come down on its head like a heavy hammer crushing its skull." This was in response to repeated threats by Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz that his forces were ready to take the "necessary steps" to eliminate the Iranian capability, an oblique reference to Israel's 1981 destruction of Iraq's Osirak reactor. (Washington Post, August 30, 2004)

One day earlier, neocon Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton had told an audience at the Hudson Institute in Washington that it was imperative that the Iranian nuclear program be brought before the U.N. Security Council. "To fail to do so would risk sending a signal to would-be proliferators that there are no serious consequences for pursuing secret nuclear weapons programs," said Bolton. "We cannot let Iran, a leading sponsor of international terrorism, acquire nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to Europe, most of central Asia and the Middle East, or beyond," Bolton added. "Without serious, concerted, immediate intervention by the international community, Iran will be well on the road to doing so." Similar threatening noises came from Condoleezza Rice at the Bush National Security Council. According to well-informed sources, Rice was directed by Cheney to call Sharon during the last week of August 2004; she advised the Israeli leader that the US was considering an attack on Iran, and suggested that Sharon put his withdrawal from the Gaza strip on hold for the time being, and focus rather on dealing with the "Iranian menace. On August 19, William Luti of the Pentagon neocon cabal told a conference call of Congressional aides from both parties that there were at least five or six countries in the world with traits which "no responsible leader can allow." Luti appeared to be hinting that Bush's axis of evil needed to be expanded, resulting in additional countries which would be eligible for pre-emptive attack. (Time, September 13, 2004)

Iranian public opinion had been shocked by a raving, psychotic column by Charles Krauthammer in the July 23 Washington Post: Krauthammer had written: "The long awaited revolution (in Iran) is not happening. Which [makes] the question of pre-emptive attack all the more urgent. If nothing is done, a fanatical terrorist regime openly dedicated to the destruction of 'the Great Satan' will have both nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them. All that stands between us and that is either revolution or pre-emptive attack." Iranian observers compared this to the US propaganda campaign which had preceded the attack on Iraq.

Anxious to return the compliment, the Iranians responded to the publication of the 9/11 commission report by attacking the 9/11 myth, always a sensitive point for the US regime. The Teheran Times described the report as a "whitewash," because it assumed that the CIA, FBI, and US military all "acted in good faith." The paper said the commission report excluded "a priori the most important question raised by the events of September 11, 2001: did US government agencies deliberately permit -- or actively assist -- the carrying out of this terrorist atrocity, in order to provide the Bush administration with the necessary pretext to carry out its program of war in central Asia and the Middle East and a huge buildup of the forces of state repression at home?" The paper scored the report's refusal to name names, and specifically asked, "were any of the Al Qaeda operatives, especially the ringleaders and organizers of the suicide hijackings, at some point assets or agents of the US intelligence services?" In this context, the Teheran Times recalled the origins of al Qaeda in the guerrilla war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, where the central role of the US intelligence agencies was well documented. The article noted: "Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, the reported mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was a longtime associate of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance and current ally of the US-backed Afghans president, Hamid Karzai." (Teheran Times, July 27, 2004)

US FORCES IN IRAQ AS HOSTAGES TO IRAN -- OR TO SHARON?

Competent US military commanders dread the prospect of war with Iran. Iran is four times the area of Iraq, and has three times the population. Its infrastructure was not destroyed during the Kuwait war in the way that Iraq's was, and Iran has not been subjected to 13 years of crippling UN sanctions on everything, including food and medicine. The Iranian military forces are intact. In case of war, Iran could be expected to use all means ranging from ballistic missile attacks on US and Israeli bases to asymmetrical warfare. The situation of the US forces already in Iraq could quickly become extraordinarily critical. Shamkhani alluded to this prospect when he said that "The U.S. military presence will not become an element of strength at our expense. The opposite is true because their forces would turn into a hostage." In reality, the US forces in Iraq were already hostages -- to Sharon, who could involve them in war with Iran at any time of his choosing.

For purposes of analogy, the Iraq war so far could be compared to the first months of the Korean War, from June to November 1950. By provoking Iran to go beyond logistical support for guerrillas and the sending of volunteers, and come into the war with both feet, the neocons would be inviting a repeat of the Chinese intervention and the disastrous US retreat south from the Yalu to south of Seoul, which still stands as the longest retreat in US military history. Just as Chinese entry into the Korean conflict in late November 1950 created a wholly new and wider war, Iranian entry into the US-Iraq war would have similarly incalculable consequences. The choices might quickly narrow to the large-scale use of nuclear weapons or defeat for the current US hollow army of just 10 divisions. War with Iran meant a military draft, just for starters. If Iran could close the Straits of Hormuz with its new anti-ship missiles, it would mean rationing of food and fuel. Bloated speculative financial structures could hardly survive.

ANOTHER STEP TOWARDS WORLD WAR III

In the case of Iran, the use of nuclear weapons by the US would have a dangerous complication: Iran is an important neighbor and trading partner of the Russian Federation, which is helping with Iran's nuclear power reactor program. The threatened US/Israeli raid on Iran might kill Russian citizens as well. Such a US attack on Iran might prod the Russian government into drawing its own line in the sand, rather than sitting idle as the tide of US aggression swept closer and closer to Russia's borders, as one country after another in central Asia was occupied. In other words, a US attack on Iran bids fair to be the opening of World War III, making explicit what was already implicit in the invasion of Iraq. The Iran war project of the neocons was the very midsummer of madness, and it underlined once more that the neocons had to go.

RUSSIANS EXPOSE US-UK TERROR ROLE AFTER SCHOOL MASSACRE

In early September, 2004, terrorists attacked a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, in the Russian Federation. Before this hostage crisis was over, more than 300 people, over half of them children, were killed. On Monday. September 6, Russian President Vladimir Putin made remarks to the western press which exposed the key role of the US and British governments in backing Chechen terrorism. Whatever Putin's previous role in events regarding Chechnya, his post-Beslan political posture tended to undercut the legitimacy of the supposed Anglo-American "war on terror," and pointed up the hypocrisy of the Bush regime's pledge that it would make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor them -- since Washington and London were currently harboring Chechens implicated in terrorism. All in all, Putin's response to the Chechen events, on the eve of the third anniversary of 9/11, brought the collapse of the official 9/11 myth measurably closer. The hypocritical terror demagogy of Bush and Blair was now undercut by the head of state of another permanent member of the UN Security Council.

On Monday September 6, Putin spoke for three and one half hours with a group of some 30 western correspondents and Russia experts at his dacha near Novo Ogarevo outside Moscow. Most US press ignored these remarks. Putin, a KGB veteran who knew whereof he spoke, told the gathering that the school massacre showed that "certain western political circles would like to weaken Russia, just as the Romans wanted to destroy Carthage." He thus suggested that the US and UK, not content with having bested Russia in the Cold War, now wanted to proceed to the dismemberment and total destruction of Russia -- a Carthaginian peace like the one the Romans finally imposed at the end of the Punic Wars in 146 BC, when they poured salt into the earth at Carthage so nothing would ever grow there again. (Le Monde, September 8, 2004) There was no link between Russian policy in Chechnya and the hostage-taking in Beslan, said Putin, meaning that the terrorists were using the Chechen situation as a pretext to attack Russia. According to a paraphrase in Le Monde: "The aim of this international terrorism, supported more or less openly by foreign states, whose names the Russian president does not want to name, is to weaken Russia from the inside, by criminalizing its economy, by provoking its disintegration through propagating separatism in the Caucasus and the transformation of the region into a military staging ground (place d'armes) for actions directed against the Russian Federation."

"Mr. Putin," continued Le Monde, "restated the accusation he had launched in a veiled form against western countries which appear to him to use double-talk. On the one side, their leaders assure the Russian President of their solidarity in the fight against terrorism. On the other hand, the intelligence services and the military -- 'who have not abandoned their Cold War prejudices,' in Putin's words -- maintain contacts with those the international press calls the 'rebels.' 'Why are those who emulate Bin Laden called terrorists and the people who kill children, rebels? Where is the logic?' asked Vladimir Putin, and then gave the answer: 'Because certain political circles in the West want to weaken Russia just like the Romans wanted to destroy Carthage.' 'But, continued Putin, "we will not allow this scenario to come to pass."' Le Monde went on: "This is, according to [Putin] a bad calculation, because Russia is a factor of stability. By weakening it, the Cold War nostalgics are clearly acting against the interests of their own country." In Putin's words: "We are the sincere champions of this cooperation [against terrorism], we are open and loyal partners. But if foreign services have contacts with the 'rebels,' they cannot be treated as reliable allies, as Russia is for them." (Daniel Vernet, "M. Poutine accuse et s'explique sur sa 'guerre totale' au terrorisme," Le Monde, September 8, 2004)

In Guardian correspondent Jonathan Steele's account of the meeting with Putin, the Russian President gave this response to the US and UK on the question of negotiating with the Chechen guerrillas of Asian Maskhadov: "Why don't you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House and engage in talks, ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace? You find it possible to set some limitations in your dealings with these bastards, so why should we talk to people who are child-killers?" (London Guardian, September 7, 2004)

On Saturday, September 4, Putin had delivered a national television address to the Russian people on the Beslan tragedy, which had left more than 300 dead, over half of them children. The main thrust was that terrorism constitutes international proxy warfare against Russia. Among other things Putin said: "In general, we need to admit that we did not fully understand the complexity and the dangers of the processes at work in our own country and in the world. In any case, we proved unable to react adequately. We showed ourselves to be weak, and the weak get beaten." "Some people would like to tear from us a tasty morsel. Others are helping them. They are helping, reasoning that Russia still remains one of the world's major nuclear powers, and as such still represents a threat to them. And so they reason that this threat should be removed. Terrorism, of course, is just an instrument to achieve these gains." "What we are dealing with, are not isolated acts intended to frighten us, not isolated terrorist attacks. What we are facing is direct intervention of international terror directed against Russia. This is a total, cruel and full- scale war that again and again is taking the lives of our fellow citizens." (Kremlin.ru, September 6, 2004; EIR, September 7, 2004)

Around the time of 9/11, Putin had pointed to open recruitment of Chechen terrorists going on in London, telling a German interviewer: "In London, there is a recruitment station for people wanting to join combat in Chechnya. Today -- not officially, but effectively in the open -- they are talking there about recruiting volunteers to go to Afghanistan." (Focus -- German weekly newsmagazine, September 2001) In addition, it is generally known in well-informed European circles that the leaders of the Chechen rebels were trained by the CIA, and that the Chechens were backed by US- sponsored anti-Russian fighters from Afghanistan. In the summer of 2004, US-UK backed Chechens destroyed two Russian airliners and attacked a Moscow subway station, in addition to the school atrocity.

Some aspects of Putin's thinking were further explained by a press interview given by Aslambek Aslakhanov, the Chechen politician who was one of Putin's official advisors. A dispatch from RIA Novosti reported Aslakhanov's comments as follows: "The terrorists who seized the school in Beslan, North Ossetia, took their orders from abroad. 'They were talking with people not from Russia, but from abroad. They were being directed,' said Aslambek Aslakhanov, advisor to the President of the Russian Federation. 'It is the desire of our "friends" -- in quotation marks -- who have probably for more than a decade been carrying out enormous, titanic work, aimed at dismembering Russia. These people have worked very hard, and the fact that the financing comes from there and that they are the puppet masters, is also clear." Aslakhanov, who was named by the terrorists as one of the people they were going to hold talks with, also told RIA Novosti that the bid for such "talks" was completely phony. He said that the hostage-takers were not Chechens. When he talked to them, by phone, in Chechen, they demanded that he talk Russian, and the ones he spoke with had the accents of other North Caucasus ethnic groups. (RIA Novosti, September 6, 2004; EIR, September 7, 2004)

On September 7, RIA Novosti reported on the demand of the Russian Foreign Ministry that two leading Chechen figures be extradited from London and Washington to stand trial in Russia. A statement from the Russia Foreign Ministry's Department of Information and Press indicated that Russia would put the United States and Britain on the spot about extraditing two top Chechen separatist officials who had been given asylum in Washington and London, respectively. They were Akhmad Zakayev, known as a "special representative" of Asian Maskhadov (currently enjoying asylum in London), and Ilyas Akhmadov, the "Foreign Minister" of the unrecognized "Chechen Republic- Ichkeria" (then residing in the USA). (RIA Novosti, September 7, 2004; EIR, September 8, 2004)

"SCHOOL SEIZURE WAS PLANNED IN WASHINGTON AND LONDON"

This was the headline of an even more explicit unsigned commentary by the Russian news agency KMNews.ru. This analysis blamed the Beslan school massacre squarely on the U.S. and British intelligence agencies. The point of departure here was that Shamil Basayev, the brutal Chechen field commander, had been linked to the attack (something that Putin advisor Aslambek Aslakhanov had said was known to the Russian FSB, successor of the KGB). The article highlighted the recent rapprochement of London and Washington with key representatives of Asian Maskhadov: Britain's giving asylum to Akhmad Zakayev (December 2003) and the USA's welcoming Ilyas Akhmadov (August 2004). Basayev, viewed in European circles as a straight-out CIA agent, openly claimed responsibility for the school massacre almost two weeks after the fact.

KMNews: CHECHEN TERROR BOSS ON US STATE DEPARTMENT PAYROLL

The Russian news agency KMNews wrote: "In early August ... 'Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Chechen Republic-lchkeria' Ilyas Akhmadov received political asylum in the USA. And for his 'outstanding services,' Akhmadov received a Reagan-Fascell grant," including a monthly stipend, medical insurance, and a well-equipped office with all necessary support services, including the possibility of meetings with political circles and leading U.S. media. "What about our partners in the 'anti-terrorist coalition,' who provided asylum, offices and money to Maskhadov's representatives?" asked the Russian press agency. Citing the official expressions of sympathy and offers of help from President Bush, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, KMNews warned: "But let's not shed tears of gratitude just yet. First we should ask: were 'Special Representative of the President of CRI' Zakayev or 'Minister of Foreign Affairs of the CRI' Akhmadov, located in Great Britain and the USA, aware of the terrorist acts that were in preparation? Beyond a doubt ... and let's also find out, how Akhmadov is spending the money provided by the Reagan-Fascell Foundation. We note: this Foundation is financed by the U.S. Congress through the budget of the State Department! "Thus, the conclusion is obvious. Willingly or not, Downing Street and the White House provoked the guerrillas to these latest attacks. Willingly or not, Great Britain and the USA have nurtured the separatists with material, information and diplomatic resources. Willingly or not, the policy of London and Washington fostered the current terrorist acts." "As the ancients said, cui bono? Perhaps we are too hasty with such sweeping accusations against our 'friends' and 'partners'? Is there a motive for the Anglo-American 'anti-terrorist coalition' to fan the fires of terror in the North Caucasus?" "Alas, there is a motive. It is no secret, that the West is vitally interested in maintaining instability in the Caucasus. That makes it easier to pump out the fossil fuel extracted in the Caspian region, and it makes it easier to control Georgia and Azerbaijan, and to exert influence on Armenia. Finally, it makes it easier to drive Russia out of the Caspian and the Caucasus. Divide et impera! -- the leaders of the Roman Empire already introduced this simple formula for subjugation."

KMNews: TERROR SUPPORTERS "ON THE BANKS OF THE THAMES AND THE POTOMAC"

KMNews continued: "Alas, it must be recognized that the co-authors of the current tragic events are to be found not in the Arab countries of the Middle East, but on the banks of the Thames and the Potomac. Will the leadership of Russia be able to make decisions, in this situation?" "Yes -- if there is the political will. The first thing is that black must be called black, and white, white. It is time to admit that no "antiterrorist coalition" exists, that the West is pursuing its egotistical interests (spreading its political influence, seizing fossil fuels deposits, etc.). Our own coalition needs to be formed, with nations that are genuinely interested in eliminating terror in the North Caucasus. Finally, it is time to change the entire tactics and strategy of counterterrorism measures. It is obvious that catching female suicide bombers on the streets of Moscow or carrying out operations to free children who are taken hostage, are, so to speak, the 'last line of defense.' It is time to learn to make preemptive strikes against the enemy, and it's time to carry combat onto the territory of the enemy. Otherwise, we shall be defeated." (Source: KMNews.ru, September 7, 2004; EIR, September 8, 2004)

Izvestia stressed the probable ethnic composition of the terrorist death squad, and its likely role in exacerbating tensions in the ethnic labyrinth of the Caucasus. Izvestia found the targeting of North Ossetia in the Beslan incident "not accidental," pointing to the danger of "irreversible consequences" for interethnic relations between Ossetians, Ingushis and Chechens. "Russia is now facing multi-vectored threats along the entire Caucasus," the paper wrote. (Izvestia, September 3, 2004)

In the wake of Putin's speech, prominent Russian commentators discussed the recent terror campaign against Russia in terms of a possible "casus belli" for a new East-West conflict. Several commentaries reaffirmed Putin's key statement that international terrorism has no independent existence, but functions only as "an instrument," wielded by powerful international circles committed (in part) to the early destruction of Russia as a nuclear-armed power. A commentary in the widely read Russian business news service RosBusinessConsult (RBC) was entitled "The West is unleashing Jihads against Russia." In language reminiscent of the Cold War, RBC charged that the recent wave of terror attacks against Russia, beginning with the sabotage of two airplanes and a terror bombing at a Moscow subway station, and culminating so far in the Beslan attack, was immediately preceded by what RBC calls "an ultimatum from the West," for Russia to turn over the Caucasus region to "Anglo-Saxon control."

ANGLO-AMERICAN TERROR ULTIMATUM TO RUSSIA FROM THE LONDON ECONOMIST

"Some days prior to the onset of the series of acts of terrorism in Russia, which has cost hundreds of lives, a number of extremely influential Western mass-media, expressing establishment positions, issued a personal warning to Vladimir Putin, that Russia should get out of the Caucasus, or else his political career would come to an end. Therefore, when the President on Saturday spoke of a declaration of war having been made against Russia, this was not just a matter of so-called 'international terrorism' ... One week prior to the first acts of terrorism, the authoritative British magazine, the Economist, which expresses the positions of Great Britain's establishment, formulated the Western position concerning the Caucasus, and above all the policy of the Anglo- Saxon elite, in a very precise manner," RBC wrote.

CZECH NGO BLOWS UP RUSSIAN TANK; BRITISH EXPERTS TRAIN CHECHEN GANGS

The RBC commentary went on to cite the Economist of August 19, 2004, which contained what RBC characterized as the virtual ultimatum to Russia. RBC noted that "the carrying out of such a series of coordinated, highly professional terrorist attacks, would be impossible without the help of qualified 'specialists'." RBC noted that at the end of August one such "specialist," working for an NGO based in the Czech republic, was arrested for blowing up a Russian armed personnel carrier. Also, British "experts" were found instructing Chechen gangs in how to lay mines. "It cannot be excluded, that also in Beslan, the logistics of the operation were provided by just such 'specialists'," noted RBC.

The RBC editorial concluded: "Apparently, by having recourse to large-scale terrorist actions, the forces behind that terrorism have now acted directly to force a 'change' in the political situation in the Caucasus, propagating interethnic wars into Russia. "The only way to resist this would be for Moscow to make it known that we are ready to fight a new war, according to new rules and new methods -- not with mythical 'international terrorists', who do not and never existed, but with the controllers of the 'insurgents and freedom fighters'; a war against the geopolitical puppet-masters who are ready to destroy thousands of Russians for the sake of achieving their new division of the world." (RBC, September 7, 2004; EIR, September 1 2004)

In a related comment, the Chairman of the Duma Foreign Affairs Committee, Dmitri Rogozin, declared in an interview on Sunday September 5: "I think [those behind the terrorism] are those who would like to see Russia totally discredited as a power ... I think that the aim is to destabilize the political situation in the country and plunge Russia into total chaos." (Ekho Moskvy, September 6, 2004) Western press organs responded to the school massacre with a campaign to blame, not the terrorists, but the Putin regime and Russian society. This disingenuous policy further stoked Russian resentment. On September 6, Strana.ru headlined, "Western Press: The Tragedy Is Russia's Own Fault," commenting that "unlike official politicians, journalists do not want to admit that the bombings and hostage-takings in our country are acts of international terrorism." (EIR, September 7, 2004) Another example this Putin-bashing was the article by Masha Lippman in the Washington Post of September 9, 2004. This was quickly followed by a campaign against Putin for being undemocratic, including, with indescribable hypocrisy, the complaint that Putin had not purged his intelligence officers after the school massacre -- this from the US, where no one had been held accountable for 9/11.

A basic reason for the US-UK surrogate warfare against Russia was the great Anglo-Saxon fear of a continental bloc of the type which emerged during the run-up to Bush's Iraq aggression. The centerpiece of the continental bloc would be the German-Russian relationship. Washington and London feared that Russia would soon agree to accept euros in payment for its oil deliveries. This would not just prevent the Anglo-Americans from further skimming off oil transactions between Russia and Europe. It would represent the beginning of the end of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world, a role which the battered greenback, weakened by Bush's $500 billion yearly trade deficit and Bush's $750 billion budget deficit, can no longer fulfill. If Russia were to adopt the euro, it was expected that the Eurasian giant would quickly be followed by Iran, Indonesia, Venezuela, and other counties. This would put an end to the ability of the US to run astronomical foreign trade deficits, and would place the question of a US return to a production- based economy on the agenda.

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The 9/11 myth was still a menace to mankind.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:54 am

PART 1 OF 2

AFTERWORD: 2004: NOT AN ELECTION, BUT A CIA COVERT OPERATION

The Bush operation in Iowa had all the smell of a CIA covert operation. ... Strange aspects of the Iowa operation [included] a long, slow count and then the computers broke down at a very convenient point, with Bush having a six point bulge. ... Manchester Union Leader, February 24, 1980. (Tarpley and Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, p. 343.)

Do you think that the electoral system in the United States is without flaws? Need I remind you of how their elections were held in the United States? -- Vladimir Putin, December 23, 2004.


The November 2004 election was the first presidential contest to be held in the US after 9/11. The rogue networks of the US invisible government, whose power had been enormously enhanced by their successful execution of the 9/11 crimes, were not inclined to tolerate any changes in the White House which might dilute their power, however minimally. Those who had presided over 9/11 and the subsequent cover-up had to remain in power, partly as a guarantee that no September criminals would be thrown to the wolves, and partly to ensure that the neocon attempt to organize the world through a war of civilizations would not be de-emphasized, but escalated.

Other countries expressed their consternation over the cold coup that gave Bush a second term not so much by protesting the blatant vote suppression and vote fraud, but rather by dumping the US dollar, provoking a dollar crisis which made it clear to all that it was the last days of Pompeii for the moribund US currency. As the dollar reached 1.35 to the euro, the handwriting on the wall presaged the jettisoning of the greenback as the residual reserve currency of the world. This 1.35 figure was also a powerful argument that the entire neocon effort to shore up the US imperial position after 9/11 had been a failure. Since the dollar (including the London eurodollar and the various xenodollars) was the nerve and fist of Anglo-American world domination, the response of the US-UK finance oligarchs and of the intelligence agencies which they control was a sudden frenzy to increase the looting rate of the world economy in a bid to give the US currency some hope for survival.

One feature of this financier frenzy was the attempt to inflict yet another strategic humiliation on the Russian Federation, this time by orchestrating a pro-NATO "people power" coup on the streets of Kiev in the Ukraine. This effort to extend the claws of NATO so far into the Russian defensive glacis revealed US intentions as openly hostile, with blunt warnings and inflammatory propaganda campaigns on both sides. (Glacis: a smooth slope or apron of a fortification.)

After their attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, and after blustering their war threats all through 2004 against Iran and Syria, the neocon fascist madmen were evidently contemplating the absolute zenith of suicidal folly: a confrontation with the Russian Federation, a thermonuclear power which, as Wolfowitz, Brzezinski, and their cliques were well aware, was the only one which retained the unquestioned ability to annihilate the United States and most of its people within a few hours. Every previous case of neocon lunacy was eclipsed by this new outburst of insanity. These events were indicative of what life would henceforth be like in the US under the rule of the 9/11 invisible government networks.

NOT AN ELECTION, BUT A CIA COVERT OPERATION

By all indications, if an honest vote count had occurred, Bush would have lost the Electoral College and very likely the popular vote as well. Every device of vote suppression, voter intimidation, vote fraud, ballot-box stuffing, e-tampering, electronic hacking, and vote stealing was cynically thrown into action by the CIA-Bush machine. Kerry had repeatedly promised his supporters that he would fight to guarantee that every vote be counted. In the hours after the polls had closed, Edwards was sent out with a short speech saying that Kerry would not capitulate, and that "every vote would be counted." But the Kerry campaign crassly reneged on this promise by conceding the election on Wednesday, November 3.

A serious candidate would have announced comprehensive legal actions to seize and impound the electronic, punch card, and optical scan voting machines which had so obviously been rigged in favor of Bush with a view to proving in court that they had been tampered with. Instead, Kerry rushed to surrender, and it was left up to the Green party and the Libertarian Party to demand an Ohio recount and pay for it with $125,000 of their own money. Kerry, in spite of his war record, proved to be a coward. He had won the election, but he would not fight to save the country from four more years of the Bush gang.

On the Thursday after the vote, Greg Palast contributed a useful article entitled "Kerry Won," which published at TomPaine.com. Here Palast argued that Kerry was the rightful winner in Ohio and New Mexico, among other states. The limitation of Palast's argument was his preponderant stress on "spoilage," the factor which causes about 3% of all votes cast in the US to be thrown out or otherwise invalidated. Spoilage is of course concentrated in low-income, black, and Hispanic polling places which usually vote heavily Democratic. All of this is of course true as far as it goes, although Palast too exclusively focused on these traditional, structural, forms of vote fraud, which have been typical over the past 40 years since William Rehnquist got his start harassing Hispanic voters. But 2004 was not your father's vote fraud. It was a very modern, hi-tech version which could not have been carried out without the full involvement of secret intelligence agencies. In other words, the 2004 vote was stolen by a conspiracy involving the Bush machine and the intelligence community, and it is this question of a grand offensive conspiracy involving spooks which appears to be, as usual, the sticking point for Palast.

During the afternoon of election day, anti-Bush sentiment was buoyed by leaks of exit polls showing that Bush was losing. Exit polling was conducted by Edison Media Research in cooperation with Mitofsky International on behalf of the National Election Pool, the name currently given to the consortium of television networks and the Associated Press which in the past has been called News Election Service, Voter News Service, etc. According to one press report, "the major networks and the Associated Press began receiving exit-poll data in the early afternoon but pledged in advance not to use it until all the polls had closed in a particular state -- even though such information, which is hardly conclusive, routinely leaks out on the Internet. Slate.com and the Drudge Report touted in mid-afternoon early exit polls showing Kerry with a one-percentage point lead in Florida and Ohio as well as significant leads in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan. ... NBC's Tim Russert noted that Kerry was winning six in 10 independent voters in Ohio. CBS's Ed Bradley noted that Kerry "won women, he won men, he won first-time voters and he won the independents in New Jersey." (Washington Post, November 3, 2004)

As these reports were transmitted through the blogosphere, the impression grew that Bush was on his way to defeat. In an article written in the late evening after the polls closed we read that "according to National Election Poll interviews of voters leaving the polls, Bush appeared to be in a real fight to hold his presidency and avoid joining his father in being swept out of office after a single term. President George H. W. Bush lost his reelection bid in 1992 to Bill Clinton, and the current president systematically sought to avoid the mistakes he believed cost his father that election. But judging from exit polls yesterday, he had not expanded his coalition in any significant ways from four years ago, leading to the fight that was unfolding last night." (Washington Post, November 3, 2004)

This is also what Bush and his entourage were thinking. Bush started his day in Crawford, Texas, where he voted. He then proceeded to a rally in Ohio. Here, according to some reports, he met personally with J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Secretary of State of Ohio, the rabidly partisan black Republican who was on the one hand the head of Bush's re-election drive in that state, and at the same time the state official overseeing the voting. Bush then flew to Washington. According to one version, "It was on the plane that strategist Karl Rove started calling around to get the results of early exit polls. But the line kept breaking down. The only information that came through as the plane descended was a BlackBerry message from an aide that simply read: "Not good." Not long afterward, Rove got a more detailed picture and told the President and senior aides the bad news. Florida Governor Jeb Bush had been saying the state was looking good, and the Bush team had expected to be ahead in Ohio. But Kerry was leading everywhere. "I wanted to throw up," said an aide onboard. ... On the ground in Arlington, Va. , that afternoon, chief strategist Matthew Dowd was walking around Bush campaign headquarters looking like a "scientist whose formulas were all wrong," said a top Bush staff member. Dowd had designed the strategy for targeting voters, and the exit polls were undermining his every theory. It would take him six long hours to crack the code. When the actual vote counts started coming in at 8 p.m., Dowd noticed that in South Carolina, Virginia and Florida the numbers were what the Republicans expected them to be; the President was outperforming the exit polls. "We've got to go talk to the press. The exit polls are wrong," Dowd said. (Time, November 15,2004, emphasis added)

The gloom had been deep in the Bush camp that afternoon. "Discouraging exit polls had poured into Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters in Arlington, with Bush strategists privately describing the early picture as cataclysmic. ... When the networks initially decreed that Virginia was too close to call, Bill Kristol of Fox News said: "That can't be good for President Bush. ..But they started reminding reporters and top supporters that those polls had been wrong in 2000, and they asserted that Bush was doing better than the figures suggested. Bush invited reporters into the White House residence around 9:37 PM in an attempt to steady his troops. 'We are very upbeat, thank you. I believe I will win, thank you very much.' The setting was designed to project confidence after a grim day around the White House." (Washington Post, November 3, 2004, emphasis added)

Another account corroborates these events: "I saw this look on [Rove's] face and then the phone died," said White House communications director Dan Bartlett. "He said, 'Not good.' It was, Bartlett added, 'like a punch in the gut.' 'I was sick,' Rove said in an interview as he talked about those moments on the president's plane. 'But then I got angry when I started seeing the numbers. None of them made any sense.' Those exit polls, of course, turned out to be wrong, as many inside the Bush headquarters believed once they began to examine them in detail, and today Rove is celebrated by none other than the president as 'the architect' of the reelection victory." (Washington Post, November 7, 2004) But the exit polls were not wrong. The exit polls were by every indication an accurate barometer of the votes the citizens thought they had cast. The difference between the exit polls and the final reported results represents the margin of vote fraud.

Electronic-cybernetic vote fraud of the type practiced by the CIA-Bush machine habitually includes a computer breakdown in the thick of the action, as the 1980 comment from William Loeb reminds us. In 2002, "a computer meltdown resulted in no release of data on Election Day. On Tuesday [November 2, 2004], new problems surfaced: a 2.5 hour data blackout and samples that at one point or another included too many women, too few Westerners, not enough Republicans and a lead for Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry in the national survey that persisted until late in the evening. In two instances on election night -- the results for Virginia and South Carolina -- the networks held off projecting a winner when voting ended because exit polls showed the races were too close to call, only to see President Bush win easily in both states," wrote one journalist. "Successive waves of the national exit poll in the afternoon and evening reported that Kerry had had a two or three-percentage point lead over Bush nationally and in several key states, including Ohio. Preliminary exit poll results had leaked throughout the day and were posted on a number of websites, including the widely viewed Drudge Report site, which added to the confusion and fanned the media frenzy."

Then came the indispensable computer breakdown, which is generally used as a cover to cook the existing data: "To compound the problem further, a server at Edison/Mitofsky malfunctioned shortly before 11 p.m. The glitch prevented access to any exit poll results until the technicians got a backup system operational at 1 :33 AM yesterday. The crash occurred barely minutes before the consortium was to update its exit polling with the results of later interviewing that found Bush with a one-point lead. Instead, journalists were left relying on preliminary exit poll results released at 8: 15 PM, which still showed Kerry ahead by three percentage points." (Washington Post, November 4, 2004) Bush was officially awarded Iowa on the Friday after the election. It had been too close to call, "but with Bush holding a 12,000-vote advantage, Iowa officials determined yesterday that there were not enough absentee votes for Kerry to overcome Bush's lead." (Washington Post, November 6, 2004)

OHIO OUTRAGES

Bush was saved by a "red shift" of about 3% to 5% in a number of key states between the exit polls and the reported results. These discrepancies, it should be noted, were always in favor of Bush, and never to his detriment. The red shift was attributable to vote fraud. A full analysis of vote fraud in the 2004 elections goes beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that Bush's forces used every known device to falsify the results of the elections. The mechanisms of vote fraud in the key battleground state of Ohio have been documented by Robert Fitrakis and his friends at http://www.freepress.org, and need not be repeated in detail here. A typical case of electronic vote fraud was the following:

The vote counting was marred in several places by computer glitches. The most serious appears to be in Ohio, which provided Bush with his decisive margin. Election officials in Franklin County, in the Columbus area, said yesterday that a computer error gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in one precinct. Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct out of 638 votes cast, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told the Columbus Dispatch. It was not clear whether Ohio experienced any other problems with electronic ballots. About 30 percent of the voters in the state voted electronically. (Washington Post, November 6, 2004)


In Ohio, vote suppression had been meticulously prepared. Blackwell had seen to it that lists of registered voters had been purged of numerous Democratic voters just before the election, using the favorite GOP pretext that these black, Hispanic, and poor people were actually convicted felons. By the time many of those purged realized what had happened, it was too late for them to be reinstated. Blackwell outdid himself in inventing technical pretexts for rejecting new registrations, and for denying and disallowing absentee ballots for voters suspected of being Democrats. Newly registered Democratic voters received threatening letters informing them that their registrations were being challenged by the Republican Party. They could bring a lawyer and witnesses to their hearings, these letters ominously added. Phantom leaflets alleged that voting had been extended through Wednesday. Other leaflets announced that would-be voters who had unpaid parking tickets, unpaid child support payments, or overdue library books would be dragged from the polls and put in prison.

Imposters placed telephone calls to likely Democratic voters telling them that their polling places had been changed -- a fraud which was revealed in many cases only after would-be voters had waited for several hours in the rain to cast their ballots, and were told to start from scratch at their original polling places. Many polling places in black, Hispanic, and low-income areas opened late. When they did open, many of them had no pencils for paper ballots, and above all far fewer electronic voting machines than in previous years, since the Blackwell machine had arranged to transfer these voting machines to affluent Republican suburbs. The lack of voting machines resulted in long lines on a rainy day, and many of the frailer voters simply gave up. Many Republican employers threatened their hourly and other workers with firing if they tarried too long at the polls, and not a few. were actually fired. Innumerable votes were lost in this way.

In the days before the election, Blackwell had demanded for the Republican Party the right to place "challengers" inside each polling place. These anti-voter vigilantes were in effect racist and fascist goons whose function was to intimidate and eject likely Democratic voters, whose names were recorded on "caging lists." These challengers had been ruled illegal by the federal district court, but this decision had been overturned by the federal circuit court in the wee hours of election day morning. The US Supreme Court had refused to hear an appeal to this outrageous decision. The knowledge that GOP goons would be running wild in the polling places doubtless convinced many other citizens to stay home. In many polling places, black voters were automatically challenged by the GOP goons and therefore given a provisional paper ballot. The provisional ballot became a new form of second class citizenship, a new Jim Crow system for the 21st century.

There were reports of boxes of provisional ballots being loaded onto mysterious privately owned trucks without any official supervision and disappearing into the night. Hispanic voters were challenged to produce proof of citizenship, including forms of identification that were not prescribed by Ohio law. This made it much harder for Hispanics to cast a ballot. Those who did get to vote had to deal with touch-screen voting machines which did not generate a voter-verifiable paper trail. Many machines persistently registered votes for Bush despite repeated efforts to vote for Kerry or others. All across the US, electronic voting machines manufactured by Diebold, Election Systems and Software, and Sequoia did yeoman service for the Bush campaign, falsifying countless votes. Bush was alleged to have won Ohio by 136,000 votes. When Kerry capitulated, over 155,000 provisional ballots and over 92,000 "spoiled" ballots, most of them from heavily Democratic polling places, had not been counted. All in all, it was a blatant violation of the Voting Rights Act, and a colossal constitutional crisis. But had not the neocon judge Scalia in December 2000 denied that US citizens had any constitutional right to vote?

The grim result of the Bush-Rove vote fraud and the capitulation of the Kerry campaign was yet another step towards domestic anarchy in the United States. The rogue networks of the invisible government were for the moment the masters of the situation. Bush was no president, but an illegitimate ruler a lawless usurper leading a rogue state, a bandit regime. The "political capital" which Bush claimed he had earned in his post-election press conference was counterfeit. His alleged mandate was as worthless as a rubber check.

After more or less successful coups in 1998 (impeachment), 1999 (bombing Serbia), 2000 (the stolen election), 2001 (the 9/11 attacks), 2002 (the illegal grant of war powers to Bush), 2003 (the Iraq war), and 2004 (another stolen presidential election), the invisible government was already planning its inevitable successor coup for 2005. One form which this may take is a further radical reduction in the powers of the Congress. Senator Frist of Tennessee, the Republican Majority Leader in the Senate, announced that the Democrats' practice of using the filibuster to prevent the confirmation of a handful of right-wing extremists to the federal appellate bench was intolerable, and must come to an end.

Frist's "nuclear option" was unilaterally to re-write the Senate rules by a coup de main, a power grab making a filibuster against judicial nominations impossible. Such a measure would reduce the Senate to a one-party fiefdom along the lines of the current House of Representatives, and weaken the Constitutional system of checks and balances by making it far more difficult for the Senate to check a president determined to put racists and fascists into the federal judiciary. The few Republican traditionalists were uneasy over this extremist proposal, and Democratic leaders threatened to paralyze the Senate with parliamentary obstructionism, but whether these forces could stop the Frist coup was not clear.

Naturally, the November 2004 coup could not have gone as smoothly as it did without the willingness of Senator Kerry to capitulate. For some, Kerry's refusal to contest manifest vote fraud was simply the consequence of his Skull & Bones pedigree. These observers imagine that Kerry received a call from Skull & Bones headquarters instructing him to throw in the towel, which he promptly did. The view here is rather that Kerry (and his wife) was an oligarchical specimen, somewhat above the average in intelligence for those circles, but unable to imagine anything other than oligarchical rule and oligarchical methods. The world of the foundations inhabited by Mrs. Kerry is in particular one of the decisive centers of oligarchical influence on American life, and there is every indication that the candidate felt at home here. It is thus Kerry's oligarchical mentality which predisposed him to surrender. Concerning the specific dynamics of the hoisting of the white flag on the day after the elections, Kerry appears to have been convinced to capitulate by Bob Shrum, who had wrecked the early phases of his campaign, and by Mary Beth Cahill, that the provisional ballots plus the absentee ballots in Ohio were not enough to surmount Bush's alleged lead.

Did Kerry have an alternative? He did: from the defeat of the Kapp putsch in Berlin in March 1920 to the defeat of the Aznar putsch in Madrid in March 2004, the successful model for resistance to an attempted coup d'etat by a clique of reactionaries has been an open-ended general strike by the labor movement, progressive political parties, students and youth, women's organizations, and their allies. This is what prevented Aznar from setting up a dictatorship in the wake of the Spanish train bombings.

In the United States in November 2004, this would have taken the form of a general strike in favor of constitutional government called out by the Democratic Party, the AFL-CIO, environmentalists, women, progressives, students, and the like. The goal would have been to shut the country down until an accurate vote count had been carried out, which would unquestionably result in the defeat of Bush. Jesse Jackson proposed something along these lines to Gore in 2000, but the idea was refused. It is a rare oligarch who is willing to detonate mass action in the streets, and Kerry too proved no exception. As for the Democratic Party, it feared alienating its plutocratic financial backers far more than the loss of any single election, and was therefore structurally incapable of mass action. If Nader contributed nothing else, he contributed an apt characterization of the Democratic Party as gutless, spineless, feckless, and clueless.

The Democrats were even afraid of taking their stand on the US Constitution. Article XIV, passed by Congress on June 13, 1866 and ratified on July 9, 1868 in response to post-Confederate election chicanery against freedmen, included provisions precisely tailored to activities of the Bush machine in Ohio, Florida, and several other states. Here we read in Section 2:

But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a State, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.


References to male voters in this amendment would of course be expanded to include all voters in the light of the XIX Amendment. Here was at least a minimal response to Bush's vote fraud coup: cut the basis of representation in the House and Senate in the vote fraud states, thereby diminishing the number of their electors in the Electoral College as well as in the two chambers.

THE 9/11 ISSUE WAS INDEED DECISIVE

Starting in November 2003, I had argued that the 9/11 issue would be the dominant one in the 2004 elections. This thesis recognized first of all that a party re-alignment was due in 2004 in which some new pattern of dominance in the Electoral College was likely to replace the post-1968 pattern of Republican hegemony based on the racist Southern Strategy developed by Kevin Phillips for Nixon. Such a party re-alignment would continue the pattern which has held true since the inception of the current US federal Constitution in 1788, and which has included similar re-alignments in 1828, 1860, 1896, and 1932, as well as 1968. My point was that, if the 9/11 myth had been dismantled, the 2004 election would probably lead to a progressive party re-alignment. If, however, the 9/11 myth were to survive intact, there was an acute danger that the party realignment would produce some form of fascist rule. Unfortunately, this second variant may now be on its way to fulfillment, although it may still be too early to say.

For those seriously committed to defeating the 9/11 myth, the most promising approach was represented by the Independent International Truth Commission, modeled more or less on the Russell-Sartre Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal of 1966-67. The failure of the 9/11 truth movement to convene the IITC prior to November 2004 constituted the single most important defeat of the 9/11 truth movement -- a defeat which all the other successes of this movement were not sufficient to counterbalance. The IITC was the adequate forum to demolish the 9/11 myth among intellectuals and opinion leaders internationally as well as to erode it nationally in the US. Instead, the initiatives which were carried out succeeded only in the regional attrition of the myth within the US, which unfortunately turned out not to be enough.

The Bush campaign presented the 9/11 myth as a new compulsory pagan civic mystery cult of which their candidate was the high priest. Bush unwaveringly built his entire campaign on the demagogic ethos of 9/11 and its related chauvinistic and racist themes. 9/11 was evoked in the majority of the most widely used Bush-Cheney television ads. The entire Republican National Convention was organized around the 9/11 motif. 9/11 was conjured up by Bush, Cheney, and their surrogates in every speech. Bush spoke about 9/11 in the televised debates, and returned to stress 9/11 in his campaign crescendo at the end of October. 9/11 was Bush's chief alibi, his pretext, his escape clause; when Bush found that his back was to the wall, he invariably reached for 9/11. The weak and vacillating Kerry allowed Bush to use the 9/11 fiasco, in reality the moment of his greatest malfeasance, as a positive credential.

The veteran Democratic Party consultant (and habitual loser) Bob Shrum argued that, after 9/11, the American people would not tolerate divisive campaigning, and would only reward a positive and upbeat campaigner. Shrum therefore prohibited the obvious attack line against Bush -- that he was the Nero of 9/11, the man who fiddled or otherwise dithered while New York burned. This, Shrum held, would represent sacrilege to the 9/11 myth and the oligarchical consensus that stood behind it. Kerry allowed himself to be dominated by Shrum until after the Republican convention, when it was already too late. These events presaged Kerry's final surrender.

Even so, the 9/11 myth came under significant attack. Howard Dean noted in December 2003 that many thought the Bush administration knew about 9/11 in advance, and objected to the phony terror alert designed to step on Kerry's convention bounce. However, Kerry and Edwards failed to hold Bush systematically accountable for his passivity before 9/11, and for freezing that day.

Former Senator Bob Kerrey, himself a 9/11 commission member, announced some days after the vote that he no longer felt bound by the non-partisan pledge sworn by all the commissioners, and outlined how the 9/11 issue could in his opinion have been turned against Bush. In Kerrey's view, this could have been done by stressing Bush's inertia, passivity, and failure to act in any way in response to the many warnings the White House was receiving about the imminence of major attacks -- the Nero of 9/11 argument. This would have amounted to an attempt to spin the 9/11 story against Bush from within the confines of the myth, and it can be debated whether such a strategy would have proven effective, but Democratic candidate Kerry was not even capable of this. This approach was also illustrated in the cover story by Benjamin DeMott in the October 2004 issue of Harper's Magazine; here the 9/11 commission report a "whitewash," a "cheat and a fraud."

There's little mystery about why the Commission is tongue-tied. It can't call a liar a liar. The most momentous subject before the 9/11 commission was: What did President Bush know about the Al Qaeda threat to the United States, when did he know it, and if he knew little, why so?.. Facing his questioners in April 2004, the President said he had not been informed that terrorists were in this country. Conceivably it was at or near the moment when Bush took this position that the members of the Commission who heard him grasped that casting useful light on the relation between official conduct and national unpreparedness would be impossible. The reason? The President's claim was untrue. It was a lie, and the Commissioners realized that they couldn't allow it to be seen as a lie. Numberless officials had ... provided circumstantial detail about their attempts ... to educate Bush as candidate, then as president-elect, then as commander in chief, about the threat from terrorists on our shores. The news these officials brought was spelled out in pithy papers both short and long; the documentation supplied was in every respect impressive. Nevertheless, the chief executive, seated before the Commission, declared: Nobody told me. And challenging the chief executive as a liar entailed an unthinkable cost -- the possible rending of the nation's social and political fabric. (Harper's, October 2004)


DeMott reviewed the much-touted Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, 2001, the gambit employed by Richard Clarke, which was declassified in April 2004 as a result of the fracas generated by the 9/11 commission hearings. This document, it will be remembered, was entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US," and contained the notation that "the FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related." This is juxtaposed by DeMott with the 9/11 commission's summary of Bush's private testimony on this issue: "The President told us the August 6 report was historical in nature."

DeMott's article should have been used as a briefing paper for a series of attacks by Kerry which would have focused on Bush's evident failure as a leader during the days and weeks leading up to 9/11, when no extraordinary meetings were held, no cabinet officers tasked, no agency heads instructed, no inter-agency process established, and in short nothing done to respond to so many urgent warnings from "clandestine, foreign government, and media reports" about imminent terrorism. This could have been done without challenging the central features of the 9/11 myth itself; it would have relied on what the non-witting part of the government, in other words the various Colleen Rowleys, was reporting about the invisible government rogue networks.

In Apri1 2004, the Washington Post had carried a cartoon (repeated in "The Year in Cartoons" on December 19, 2004) which shows a tin man Cheney, a cowardly lion FBI, a scarecrow CIA, and a "Dorothy" Bush watching while a witch flies across the sky, tracing this message: "Surrender Dorothy! Or I'll fly planes into buildings. -- Osama." The FBI lion comments: "What's it mean?" 'It's too vague!" complains the CIA scarecrow. "Yeah ... and who is this 'Dorothy' character?" adds Bush. Seconded by the ever-scowling Miss Rice, Bush acted as if measures to foil the 9/11 plot were some kind of debutante cotillion which he would never dream of attending unless he had received an engraved invitation with his name calligraphically embossed upon it. That Kerry was incapable of even addressing this mass of empirical evidence of Bush's unfitness for office is a damning commentary on the Democratic challenger's lack of intellectual courage; granted, he owed his candidacy to Dean's immolation by the media on the 9/11 issue.

There would have been an adequate demographic base for an attack on the 9/11 myth. A Zogby International poll commissioned by Jimmy Walter in late August showed that just under 50% of New York City residents did not believe the official version, and thought the US had foreknowledge of the attacks; slightly fewer in New York state agreed.

A Pentagon flash animation on the Internet debunking the government contention that a Boeing 757-200 hit the Defense Department headquarters attracted a mass audience, forcing an article on this subject in the Washington Post. For the highbrow, BBC-2 television in October broadcast "The Power of Nightmares," a documentary which contended that al Qaeda simply does not exist, except as a "myth" and "dark illusion." This myth had been created by failed politicians whose slogans no longer work, and who were desperate to keep their power, this program argued. For the lowbrow, Howard Stern hosted spokesmen for the 9/11 truth movement and told his 13 million listeners that he did not believe a commercial airliner hit the Pentagon; a cruise missile, he said, was a far more plausible explanation.

To this must be added the collective impact of scores of websites, plus conferences in Berlin, Lucerne, San Francisco, and Toronto, -- all multiplied through innumerable Internet radios, alternative television, videocassettes, DVDs, books, blogs and streaming web postings. The September 11 rally at Manhattan Center in New York City was advertised in the main newspapers of the metropolitan area, and was attended by some 1,300 people. The Los Angeles Citizens' Grand Jury, which met at the Bob Hope Patriotic Hall on October 24, was a people's initiative in which ordinary citizens went far beyond the unanswered questions to roundly condemn several key features of the official myth as physically impossible, while specifying that a rogue network inside the US government were the prime suspects in the case.

Towards the end of October, one hundred left liberal notables and 9/11 researchers including Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Ralph Nader, and Howard Zinn demanded the re-opening of the 9/11 investigation and petitioned New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to undertake this task. But, like all purely legal tactics, the Spitzer complaint ceded the initiative and the timetable to the lawyers, rather than keeping politics in command. Whatever chances this tactic may have had were sharply diminished when Spitzer announced that he was running for governor of New York State; Spitzer was hardly likely to compromise his gubernatorial prospects by becoming the Jim Garrison of the 9/11 cover-up scandal. It is also worth noting that Ralph Nader, in the several C-SPAN press conferences this writer was able to monitor, never brought up 9/11 as one of his core issues, and in fact almost never mentioned 9/11 at all.

The 9/11 truth movement was hobbled by those who persisted in making the "unanswered questions" theme their central issue. One could imagine that, come judgment day, when Gabriel sounds his horn to announce the resurrection, some misguided activists will jump out of their graves to repeat their still unanswered questions. Three years and more after 9/11, it was time to develop some answers.

Another weakness of the 9/11 truth movement was the tendency of some to rely on bereaved family members for their moral and political authority. The 9/11 families represented a broad spectrum; some were models of irenic humanitarianism in the quest for world peace and atonement. Others appeared to be xenophobes and even racists. Some supported Kerry, some supported Bush. One group, obsessed with what it called "intelligence reform," agitated above all to enact the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, some of which amounted to Patriot Act II on the installment plan, and all of which left the actual September criminals untouched. It was in any case a tragic waste to devote the two or three hours the 9/11 truth movement had on C-SPAN to pointless testimonials by family members. For those seriously committed to defeating the 9/11 myth, the only road remained the Independent International Truth Commission.

For the moment, the CIA-Bush machine may appear to have jammed a crowbar into the wheels of history. But it is also worth recalling that the 36-year cycles are only approximations which have held true since the aftermath of the Civil War; in earlier years we can observe a 40-year cycle (1788-1828) and a 32 year cycle (1828-1860). This means that while some profound change in the ruling regime is now unquestionably overdue, this cannot be calculated with chronometric precision. The 1788-1828 cycle almost ended in 1824, when a disputed election thrown into the House of Representatives ended with the victory of John Quincy Adams, with the backing of Henry Clay, over Andrew Jackson. This outcome had the positive effect of prolonging the first 36-year cycle for four more years under Adams, before the disasters of the Jackson presidency. Something of this sort may have happened in 2004 to produce Bush's second term, but in a disastrous and negative key.

There is of course also the more sinister possibility that the long-running era of US constitutional government is simply coming to its natural or unnatural end, and that the Bush cold coup of 2004 is a harbinger of that grim fact. And indeed, the general tendency of the recent machinations of the US shadow government appears as the incessant weakening of the US power base of empire -- as a result of foolhardy actions which are supposed to be shoring it up.

Of course, it is only in the world of cable television schizophrenic make-believe that George Bush has been re-elected as president of the United States. Bush is a legitimate president only in the eyes of those well-paid commentators who spent the days after the election inventing fantastic stories about the triumph of moral values (in the person of the alcohol and cocaine-ravaged George W. Bush!) as the true key to the 2004 election. In the real world Bush was defeated by virtue of majority opposition in the country to his misrule, and that majority opposition, although demoralized and disoriented by Kerry's craven capitulation, can only remain and grow.

Normally a failed politician like Bush would have departed after one term, as his notorious father did, taking with him all the hatred, resentment, scandals, and vendettas of a wretched first term. In particular, the rustication of Bush to Crawford, Texas, would have tended to defuse such latent scandals as the exposure of Valerie Plame, the traducing of US state secrets to neocon darling Ahmed Chalabi, the counterfeiting of the Niger yellowcake documents, and the Israeli mole in the Pentagon. As it is, all these scandals, like the Watergate break-in of 1972, remain to haunt the second Bush term. And to these must be added the far greater scandals first of the 9/11 attacks themselves, and now of the massive vote fraud of 2004. Here is a mass of scandal material more than sufficient to blow Bush II into interplanetary space.

But now G. W. Bush wants to prolong his hold on the White House for four more years. The conflicts which were suppressed by voter intimidation and vote fraud are still boiling in the cauldron of a US society tormented by war and depression, and these conflicts will necessarily find ways to explode in Bush's face. One way that this may happen is through conflict inside the Republican Party. In the weeks before the election I had argued that the Republicans might not survive relegation to the opposition. This was true enough, but it now would appear that they may not be able to survive their current monopoly of the entire US federal government either. Since the GOP dominates the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches, we can expect that conflicts in the broader society will also take the form of conflicts within the Republican Party. The rush to the exits of Powell, Ashcroft, Ridge, and other cabinet secretaries in the weeks after the election was not a good omen for Bush. Then Bush attempted to nominate former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, a stooge and creature of Rudolph Giuliani, to be the new Secretary of Homeland Security. The result was an avalanche of derogatory revelations about Kerik which speedily terminated his candidacy.

Then, in the wake of a question from a soldier about the failure of the Pentagon to provide armored vehicles for the troops in Iraq, there followed a wave of vehement attacks against Rumsfeld. This time the glib rhetoric of the Pentagon boss was not effective. Republican senators like McCain, Hagel, and others proclaimed they had no confidence in the Defense Secretary. William Kristol joined the yelping pack to call for Rumsfeld's ouster, showing that there is no loyalty among neocons (or at least no loyalty to one who is not a professed disciple of Leo Strauss).

All of this took place before Bush's second term had even begun. Eisenhower's second term was marred by the scandal of White House chief of staff Sherman Adams and his vicuna coats. Nixon's second term was cut short by the Watergate affair. Reagan could easily have been impeached over the Iran-Contra affair of his second term, had Lee Hamilton not been on the scene to protect the invisible government. Clinton was of course impeached in his second term, although over trifles in comparison to what is hanging around Bush's neck. There is therefore good reason to see Bush as vulnerable to second-term problems of much greater magnitude.

This will no doubt be exacerbated by Bush's characteristic megalomania; his announced determination is to privatize the Social Security system. Wall Street financiers know that, in addition to the problems generated by the weakness of the dollar, they also face a demographic problem: by about 2007, the first cohorts of the postwar baby boom generation will begin to retire. At this point they will stop being net buyers of stocks and mutual funds, and will become net sellers of those instruments. This means that the current updraft in the stock market will be replaced by a powerful downdraft, potentially leading to a crash. The finance oligarchs have therefore been concerned to find a way to pump US government funds directly into the stock market, in the hopes of maintaining the bloated speculative prices that still prevail. Their preferred solution is to batten on to the Social Security payroll tax for that purpose. This amounts to the destruction of the last surviving component of the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal. Bush may well find that his efforts to loot Social Security for the benefit of the Wall Street financiers will unleash forms of social and political resistance which it will be difficult for him to withstand.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:54 am

PART 2 OF 2 (AFTERWORD CONT'D.)

IRAQ AND PALESTINE: THE FUTILITY OF IMPERIALISM

Soon after Bush's vote fraud operation, the US moved with sickening predictability to crush the Iraqi resistance in Fallujah. After an immense slaughter of civilians, the US command announced that it had "broken the back" of the Iraqi resistance. The US propaganda machine had been at great pains to build up a certain Zarkawi as the leader of the Iraqi resistance, and there was every reason to believe that Zarkawi, to the extent that he exists at all, was run by the US as a countergang to the coalition forces. Notably, during the same week in October when BBC 2 was broadcasting its documentary entitled "The Power of Nightmares," which advanced philosophical doubts about the existence of bin Laden and his band in the real world, Zarkawi felt moved to rush to the defense of bin Laden's credibility by proclaiming his own eternal loyalty to the erratic Saudi sheikh -- which only confirmed that both bin Laden and the phantomatic Zarkawi, around whom the strangest rumors swirl, are CIA/MI-6 projects from beginning to end.

In reality, the US forces had only succeeded in shifting the main theater of resistance combat northward to Mosul. The death of Arafat during the same period underlined that the US occupation of Iraq was now just as bankrupt as the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. In both cases, the foreign occupation of sovereign Arab territory is the cause of the resistance; the only way to end hostilities is to end the foreign occupation, which becomes more odious to the victim population with each successive month.

In the case of the Palestinian territories, the general outlines for peace are doubtless those of the Yasser Abed Rabbo Yossi Beilin Geneva accord of November 2003: all Israeli settlements must be removed from the occupied territories, and a Palestinian state must be erected in the West Bank and Gaza as a sovereign state, not a glorified Bantustan. The Israeli wall might be legitimate, but only on Israeli land, if it follows the internationally recognized line of demarcation. The Palestinian right of return must apply only to the new Palestinian state, and not to Israel. Israeli settlers and Palestinian refugees ought of course to be indemnified, and here is one area where the United States and the European Union could contribute. The Palestinian state must extend security guarantees to Israel, and to be effective, these must not be undermined by false-flag synthetic terror. One Italian philosopher, Enrico Nuzzo of Salerno, has suggested that both Israel and Palestine could become members of the European Union, a proposal which would facilitate economic reconstruction and development. In one way or another, a comprehensive Marshall Plan for the underdeveloped and war-torn states of the entire Middle East should be provided, under non-monetarist auspices.

The mindless Bush regime never tires of repeating the mantra of "finish the job" and "a democratic Iraq." Here again, it is the US occupation which is radicalizing the situation by eliciting a national resistance. Peace can come only after the occupation is ended. The situation of the hapless US forces in the country could soon become extraordinarily critical, leading to their concentration in a few enclaves in the desert supplied from the air. Iraq would appear to be converging on something like the famous Sicilian vespers of 1282, when a spontaneous general mass uprising, triggered by an insult to a Sicilian lady leaving a church service, suddenly drove the French occupying forces of Charles of Anjou out of that Mediterranean island.

THE DEATH AGONY OF THE DOLLAR SYSTEM

In November 2004, the US dollar collapsed to a level of $1.35 to the euro. Exchange bureaus in Europe were selling euros for $1.45, as American tourists howled. It looked like the beginning of a new world monetary crisis, for the first time since 1973. The immediate trigger was a comment from Greenspan, attending a finance conference, to the effect that the US current account deficit was unsustainable because foreigners could not be counted on to keep buying dollar-denominated assets. Soon the Russian and Indonesian central banks signaled that they were continuing to diversify out of the dollar, and it became clear that the Chinese central bank was doing the same thing.

Although the euro had been gaining ground fast of late, two thirds of world central bank reserves were still kept in dollars, for a value of $2.3 trillion. At stake was the absurd and obsolete role of the dollar as the sole reserve currency of the world, a role which has become increasingly untenable since the emergence of a solvent rival currency in the form of the euro. The US was by far the world's largest debtor nation, with almost $3.3 trillion in net foreign liabilities.

The inherent instability in the dollar system was that the dollar was the reserve currency while the US was also the biggest debtor on the planet, and things were getting worse fast. According to the OECD Economic Outlook, the US current account deficit was on track to rise to $825 billion per year (or 6.4% of GD P) by 2006, approximately the mid-point in Bush's second term.

By 2008, when Bush is getting ready to head for the last roundup, the US current account deficit would likely rise to 8% of GDP per year. But, as the gnomes of the City of London pointed out, the breaking point will be reached well before that. The dollar, in their view, was headed for a $1.80 to the euro exchange rate in the near future. That would then pose a problem for the holders of some $11 trillion in dollar-denominated assets, the largest single category of the world's "wealth." If the dollar were to begin an even more dramatic slide, they would be motivated to run for the exits, dumping their dollar assets and sinking the greenback. That would blowout the US housing bubble causing a "deep recession," the polite term for a world economic breakdown crisis. Fear of this is mainly what is keeping many central bankers from selling off their dollars right now; this is what Larry Summers, Clinton's Treasury Secretary (now president of Harvard) has called "the balance of financial terror." (London Economist, December 4, 2004) In other words, a dollar devaluation of the most serious type is now inevitable, and may bring down what passes for a world monetary system. How much of that $11 trillion in dollar-denominated paper will survive? Will it be 40%? Or 25%? Or less? In any case, the amount of wealth in the world is going to turn out to be much less than is currently thought, because so much of that $11 trillion will shortly be exposed as purely fictitious capital.

The dollar's reserve currency status is the true heart of US international arrogance. As Simon Nixon commented, the privileged status of the dollar gives the US "the freedom to keep printing dollars without sparking inflation, enabling it to fund wars, giant trade deficits, government spending programs and tax cuts." The US is thus bereft of an economic reality principle. The really decisive issue is when a major oil producer will stop accepting dollars. Nixon notes that the British pound's half-life as a reserve currency after World War II ended when Saudi Arabia stopped taking pounds. Today, when it comes to the dollar, "even the Saudis are wavering ... If the oil producers turn their back on the dollar, the ramifications for the global economy will be immense. ...[b ]oth oil exporters and importers would switch a significant proportion of their reserves into euros, thus triggering a stampede out of the dollar into euros." Another "danger is that if Asian central banks do stop buying dollars, the result will be a devastating collapse of the US currency." The US therefore faces "a challenge to their economic hegemony." (London Spectator, October 18, 2003; Philadelphia Trumpet, February 2004) During 2004, there has already been a net outflow from the US of long-term foreign investment.

Perhaps the neocons will goad Saudi Arabia or Russia into taking the plunge. Putin and Schroder discussed how the EU could buy oil from Russia with euros in early October, 2003. That news "set off a chain reaction in the private sector, leading to a fourfold increase in euro deposits in Russian banks this year and sending Russian citizens scrambling to change their stashes of greenbacks into euro notes." (Daily Telegraph, October 10, 2003; Philadelphia Trumpet, February 2004) The solution to the world monetary crisis was a new Bretton Woods system among euro, yen, and dollar, with fixed parities set by participating governments, the comprehensive re-regulation of financial markets, and a mechanism for international clearing and gold settlement to prevent any participant from running chronic deficits in the way the Anglo-Americans customarily had. Most important, the new Bretton Woods had to be a monetary system explicitly geared to the fullest scientific, technological, and economic development of the third world, with rising living standards, longevity, and energy throughput for humanity as a whole.

THE NEW COLD WAR WITH RUSSIA

This book differs from all studies of 9/11 which have been examined so far in the importance it gives to the US-Russian nuclear forces relation as the framework in which the 9/11 criminal attacks must be understood. This book proceeds from an intelligence and counterintelligence picture of explosive US-Russian military, political, and terrorist tensions which have been masked to some extent by the charade of friendship which Bush and Putin have practiced in public. The view here is that on 9/11 Putin, seeing the hegemony of the invisible government lunatics in Washington and London, decided to adopt a policy of war avoidance through broad concessions to the US at many levels, including central Asia.

Putin could see that the neocon war plans for the Middle East would exhaust, weaken, and disperse US forces, while Russia might become stronger over the same months and years. In the service of this policy, Putin was prepared silently to swallow many a bitter affront and injury. To this extent, the relation between Bush and Putin may be seen in the light of the Hitler-Stalin relationship of September 1939-June 1941. This analogy is suggestive, but we should not follow it into every detail. We must also remember, as General Suvorov's "icebreaker" thesis specifies, that Stalin was preparing his own attack on Hitler, Operation Thunder, for early July 1941. Hitler, with his smaller forces, was able to strike first, in effect beating Stalin to the draw. This is the kind of unstable relation that now obtains between the world's two great nuclear powers. And there should be no doubt that, if Russia can destroy the US superpower, as it most assuredly can, then it is a sophistry to deny that Russia emphatically qualifies as a superpower too. Scenarios have suddenly become plausible which lead to general thermonuclear war.

The future being prepared for Russia by the neocons became clear shortly after Putin assumed power. Shortly before 9/11 Jeffrey Tayler wrote a cover story for the Atlantic Monthly ("Russia is Finished") in which he developed an apocalyptic perspective for the Eurasian giant:

Internal contradictions in Russia's thousand-year history have destined it to shrink demographically, weaken economically, and possibly disintegrate territorially. The drama is coming to a close, and within a few decades Russia will concern the rest of the world no more than any Third World country with abundant resources, an impoverished people, and a corrupt government. In short, as a Great Power, Russia is finished. (Atlantic, May 2001)


Note well: "internal contradictions." Cultural determinism, and not the IMF, not the great criminal revolution of shock therapy, not Jeffrey Sachs, not Anders Aslund, not the US-UK oil cartel's campaign to loot the oil of Siberia, not US UK support for Chechen and other terrorists.

In this contest, Putin has the decisive merit of simply wanting to defend his country from the Anglo-Americans. As the Beslan school massacre showed, Putin was also the victim of Anglo-American terrorism. Putin has shown great restraint in not reacting to US-UK provocations, like the Kursk incident and others. Putin has also been right: the neocons have substantially weakened the US military position in the world. Putin has also been correct in thinking that a few years might give Russia some important strategic trump cards useful for facing down the self-styled Anglo-American neocon supermen. This was illustrated on November 18, 2004, when Putin announced that Russia possessed a new and advanced strategic nuclear missile unlike any held by any other country.

Some speculated that this was a mobile third generation version of the Topol M missile, known to NATO as the SS-27. Others thought Putin was referring to the Bulava submarine launched long-range ballistic missile. Whichever it was, it appeared that this new Russian missile had capabilities which would allow it to defeat any US strategic anti-missile defense over the relevant historical future. Putin stressed that foreign countries would not be able to match his new missile for a very long time. Russia appeared to be ahead of the US in a number of key strategic departments; it appeared that Putin had chosen to generously support certain key areas of weapons development which might give him a critical advantage over the Anglo-Saxons if confrontation were to loom.

Another example of this was the SS-N-22 Sunburn, called Moskit in Russian, a supersonic cruise missile which could fly as fast as Mach 3 and as low as nine feet above the surface of the water. This formidable weapon had clearly been conceived for the purpose of destroying US aircraft carriers, and it was said to have been sold to China (and to Iran, according to some unconfirmed reports). Russia's nuclear deterrent was not just alive and well, it was extremely robust.

Why Putin had chosen November 18 to make this momentous announcement became clearer on Sunday, November 21, when the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) attempted a "people power" coup in Ukraine. The cynical propaganda technicians of Connecticut Avenue had orchestrated a mass movement of street mobs around the presidential candidacy of former prime minister Yushchenko, whose main attraction for them was his pledge to lead Ukraine into full membership in NATO. The candidacy of current Prime Minister Yanukovych had received explicit support from Putin.

The Yushchenko supporters were using the playbook developed by the NED in toppling Milosevic in Serbia in 2000; the same methods had also been successful in ousting the pro-Moscow Eduard Shevardnadze in the "revolution of roses" in Georgia in the first days of 2004. (In Belarus, a similar attempt had been beaten back.) The Yushchenko forces styled themselves as the orange revolution, and blocked the streets of Kiev, claiming that the apparent election victory by Yanukovych represented vote fraud. Many were sincerely interested in democratic reform, but this did not make them any less dupes of the perception-mongers from Washington. The street mobs were able to secure the rejection of the election results by the supreme court, and the calling of a new election for several weeks later.

Much of the operation had been conduited through Poland by the Brzezinski family clique; in addition to Zbigniew, the prophet of 9/11 and the man responsible for the 1979-1988 Afghan War and thus for the emergence of bin Laden & Co., there was now also his nepotistic son Mark, a veteran of the Clinton NSC. Zbigniew was notorious as a hysterical Russophobe and nostalgic of the petty Polish nobility, or szlachta. Both Brzezinskis were giving media interviews around the clock during the first days of the Ukraine crisis, and it may have been in their service that Lech Walesa, the former president of Poland, made bold to offer his services in Ukraine as a mediator.

Support for Yanukovych was strong in the industrialized cities in the eastern Ukraine, where much of the population were ethnic Russians. Yushchenko's own political fiefdom was an economic wasteland. Fascist skinheads could be seen among Yushchenko's orange legions, but western commentators were willing to count them as democratic because they were anti-Russian. When Yanukovych's victory was abrogated in the courts, officials in the eastern Ukraine began to talk about home rule, and then about secession. If secession were tried, would anyone try to prevent it by force? Would Russia intervene on the side of the secessionists? Would Poland, now a NATO power, intervene against Russia? Would the US and the rest of NATO then be drawn into the worst of all insane adventures? Putin had some sharp exchanges with EU foreign affairs spokesmen, since many Europeans had foolishly allowed themselves to be taken in by the orange carnival. However, German Chancellor Schroder seemed to have some understanding of the farce in Kiev, and his planned summit with Putin was successfully held in Schleswigjust before Christmas, although the crucial step of adopting the euro for paying the EU's oil bills was apparently not taken.

Needless to say, Ukraine is the royal road taken by every invader of Russia, from Napoleon to Hitler. Tampering with Ukraine is a recipe for triggering the instinctive defense of Russia, which is still a powerful instinct in most Russians. What possible American interest could be served by extending NATO all the way to the Crimea? In the meantime, this book's view of the world strategic context had been decisively validated. Putin underlined this with his wry Christmas present to the Anglo-Americans, which was the nationalization of the huge Yukos oil company, whose former boss, the oligarch Khodorkovsky, remained in jail. Putin's move was seen as a prelude to the large-scale roll-back of the widespread illegal nomenklatura privatizations of Soviet state property under Yeltsin's pro-IMF regime in the early 1990s.

The Bush regime won yet another Oscar for international hypocrisy in regard to the Ukrainian situation. Bush had just stolen another term in office thanks to a vote fraud of pharaonic proportions. But while he savored vote fraud in Ohio and Florida, he claimed to find it intolerable in Kiev. The same was true of the farcical European Union election observers, who had been invited in by the US State Department under the auspice of the Helsinki accords and the OSCE. They were blind to vote fraud in Columbus, but eagle-eyed in Kiev. (The same crew proposed to validate the bloody grand guignol of US-backed elections in Iraq -- but only from the safety of Jordan!)

US strategy had been concerned with isolating, impoverishing, and destabilizing the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, its successor states, and its alliances for a long time. In 1989-90, the NATO coalition had succeeded in dismantling its long-time adversary, the Warsaw Pact. With the fall of the communist regimes in eastern Europe, the Soviet-led economic bloc, the Comecon or CMEA (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance), also fell apart. The Soviet Union itself had needlessly been driven into extinction in December 1991. In 2004, it became increasingly evident that Anglo-American policy aimed at breaking up the Russian Federation, the old RSFSR, itself. The overarching goal here was absolute and uncontested Anglo-American world domination, to be obtained by completing the Balkanization of Russia as a great power. The Russian strategic arsenal would be removed or at least divided somewhere along the way. An included feature of this geopolitical quest was of course Russia's status as the world's second largest oil exporter.

The great development of 2003 was the re-emergence, after a century of futile and fratricidal conflict, of the continental bloc of France, Germany, and Russia, the main alternative to bankrupt Anglo-American world domination. In 2002 Germany had provided leadership for this bloc with Schroder's steadfast rejection of the neocon Iraq aggression. In 2003 Chirac and Villepin had taken over the lead, also with regard to Iraq. In 2004, Putin had challenged the Anglo-Americans over their sponsorship of terrorism and hostile intent.

The last days of 2004 were a somber time. There was much consternation across the world because of the prospect of four more years of Bush. There is a considerable body of evidence that the modern territorial national state is becoming obsolete and may need to be replaced. But it may not yet be conclusive.

If we recall Machiavelli's three moments of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy ( corresponding to the ontological categories of the one, the few, and the many, which will always be with us), then we must note that all attempts to go beyond the national state (the United Nations, the European Union) have been conducted on an oligarchical basis, and thus contain strong tendencies which are antithetical to human progress and to the overcoming of the current world crisis. The main problem of oligarchy is its mediocrity and inertia, the latter being especially stubborn because change requires convincing so many different oligarchs to cooperate. The prevalent oligarchy needs to be balanced by a strong executive, in effect a world president. This was the genius of the new monarchy of early modern Europe, in which kings like Louis XI of France and Henry VII of England allied with their respective bourgeoisies to terminate the abuses of the feudal aristocracy.

Given the profoundly oligarchical nature of the current world, it is much to be feared that any world government institutions which might be created in the foreseeable future would be even more vitiated by oligarchy than the existing ones. The problem facing advocates of world government is to chart a course for arriving at a unified world executive, an extremely touchy matter for many obvious reasons. If it could be done peacefully, a future world federal state might supercede the current United Nations in the same way the US federal Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation, which had an oligarchical congress but no executive to check them. But, given the power of the neocon warmonger clique in today's world, it appears dilatory and utopian to even speculate on such possibilities. It is unfortunately more likely that world government will be attained, if it ever is, as a result of a new and cataclysmic world war in which entire national states, weakened by the globalization depression, will disappear as readily as royal dynasties did at the end of World War I.

We are living in the twilight of the Anglo-American world order, a system of planetary domination by the Whig financier faction since just after 1700. This system had certain positive features, but it has now become a barrier to human progress, and it is past time for it to exit the world scene:

The old order changeth, yielding place to the new,
And God fulfills himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
-- Tennyson


By some reckonings, we now stand at the beginning of a new fascist era. If that night must come, let it at least have the vivid clarity and sharpness of a polar night, not clouded by the fog of myth and lies.

W.G.T.
December 23, 2004
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 10:00 am

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