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.

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

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 6:55 am

9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA
by Webster Griffin Tarpley
© 2004 by Webster Griffin Tarpley

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To my wife Leah and my daughter Chloe, for their love and support during the wilderness years.
E s’io al vero son timido amico,
Temo di perder vita tra coloro
Che questo tempo chiameranno antico.
Paradiso XVII, 117-120


TABLE OF CONTENTS:

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
o THE FIFTEEN DRILLS OF 9/11
o ABLE DANGER: 2.5 TERABYTES OF TREASON
o SAS CAR BOMBERS IN BASRA
o Appendix: The London Explosions, The Rogue Network, Bush, and Iran
o The Phony War on Terror: Time to Quarantine the Real Aggressors
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I – THE MYTH OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
o THE SEPTEMBER CRIMINALS ARE STILL AT LARGE
o WHAT DO YOU KNOW AND HOW DO YOU KNOW IT?
o BUSH AS INVETERATE LIAR
o BANKRUPT LEFTISTS
o BLAIR’S 9/11 DOSSIER: THE CLIFF’S NOTES VERSION
o NUMBER 10 DOWNING STREET – KITCHEN OF LIES
o TORRICELLI: AN IMMEDIATE BOARD OF INQUIRY
o SKEPTICAL GOVERNMENTS
o MOSLEM VOICES CONDEMN 9/11, DENY OFFICIAL STORY
o THE LIES OF THE US PRESS
o THE MEACHER CRITIQUE
o PAUL HELLYER REJECTS THE US ORTHODOXY
o POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY
o THE FAILURE OF THE KEAN-HAMILTON 9/11 COMMISSION
CHAPTER II – THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF SYNTHETIC TERRORISM
o PATSIES
o THE PATSY MILIEU
o MOLES
o SIBEL EDMONDS: INSIDE THE FBI MOLE HILL
o EXPERT PROFESSIONALS
o OPERATION NORTHWOODS
o THE MOSSAD'S FALSE FLAG AL QAEDA CELL
o TERRORIST MURDER AS BRITISH STATE POLICY
o CONTROLLED CORPORATE MEDIA
o A COMMAND CENTER
o CONDUCTED BY A NETWORK
o P2OG AS OFFICIAL AGENTS PROVOCATEURS
CHAPTER III – THE ROOTS OF 9/11: THE GLOBALIZED CRISIS OF THE 1990s
o OLIGARCHICAL MALTHUSIANISM THEN AND NOW
o THE FAKE OIL SHOCKS OF THE 1970s
o CHENEY WANTS $100 A BARREL OIL
o US OLIGARCHICAL CONSENSUS FOR TERRORISM
o THE 1990s: DECADE OF US FINANCIAL CRISIS
o AUGUST -SEPTEMBER 1998: RUSSIA AND LTCM TAKE WORLD TO BRINK
o END OF DOLLAR HEGEMONY?
o TO THE BRINK OF SYSTEMIC BREAKDOWN: FINANCIAL CRISES AND PANICS AFTER 1987
o END OF DOLLAR HEGEMONY?
 IRAQ
 IRAN
 VENEZUELA
 INDONESIA
 MALAYSIA
 SAUDI ARABIA: THE PARTING OF THE WAYS WITH THE US, AUGUST 2001
 THE EUROPEAN UNION
o THE CATASTROPHE OF GLOBALIZATION
o US AS WEIMAR GERMANY
o ONE COUP PER YEAR: USA, 1998-2004
o APRIL 9, 1999: YELTSIN WARNS OF WORLD WAR
o "I'M NOT GOING TG START WORLD WAR III FOR YOU"
o MAY 7, 1999: US BOMBS CHINESE EMBASSY
o THE KURSK: "WORLD WAR III COULD HAVE BEGUN SATURDAY"
o THE NEOCONS ANTAGONIZE CHINA
CHAPTER IV: AL QAEDA: THE CIA’S ARAB LEGION
o AL QAEDA, BIN LADEN: THE ACCUSED
o ALBRIGHT SABOTAGES EXTRADITION OF BIN LADEN BY SUDAN
o FBI TOLD BY BUSH TO BACK OFF BIN LADENS
o BUSH 41 WORKS FOR BIN LADENS VIA CARLYLE GROUP
o BERNARD LEWIS: BIN LADEN'S FLACK
o THE LANGLEY BIN LADEN FAN CLUB
o LE FIGARO: BIN LADEN TREATED AT AMERICAN HOSPITAL, JULY 2001
o AL QAEDA AND NATO'S BALKAN DRUG RUNNING
o ZAWAHIRI AND NATO'S DARLING, THE KLA
o BRITISH TERROR SCHOOLS FOR PATSIES
o AL QAEDA AND LONDONISTAN
o AL QAEDA AND MI-5 AGAINST LIBYA
o NEOCONS' PLAN FOR AL QAEDA'S GLOBAL FUTURE
o PRELIMINARIES: TERRORISM IN THE 1990s
 THE WORLD TRADE CENTER 1993: THE FBI SET IT UP AND LET IT HAPPEN
 OKLAHOMA CITY
 TWA 800
 US SPECIAL FORCES SERGEANT ALl MOHAMED: BIN LADEN'S PERSONAL ASSISTANT
 EGYPTAIR 990: THE DEBUT OF GLOBAL HAWK?
 AMERICAN 587
CHAPTER V: COULD THE ALLEGED HIJACKERS FLY THE PLANES?
o FLIGHT SCHOOLS FOR PATSIES
o THE FALSE FLAG AIR FORCE
o MOHAMED ATTA, PORK CHOP FUNDAMENTALlST
o TERRORISTS FROM US MILITARY BASES
o COULD ATTA, SHEHHI, HANJOUR AND JARRAH PILOT LARGE AIRLINERS?
o HANI HANJOUR, MISFIT
o AL QAEDA STALWARTS: DUMB AND DUMBER
o WHY WERE THEY NOT ARRESTED?
o WHAT DID THE HIJACKERS THINK THEY WERE DOING'?
o WERE THE ACCUSED HIJACKERS PHYSICALLY CAPABLE OF PILOTING THE PLANES?
o MUBARAK'S CRITIQUE
o NIKKI LAUDA: ACTUAL FLIGHT EXPERIENCE ON BOEINGS WAS REQUIRED
o THE GRANDPRE SEMINAR
o HYPOTHESIS: GLOBAL HAWK
o THE SCENARIO FOR 9/11 ON FOX ENTERTAINMENT
o DOPPELGANGER, PHANTOMS, AND APPARITIONS
o "KSM"
o THE LIVING DEAD
o BEHIND THE AIR DEFENSE DEBACLE: 9/11 MANEUVERS
o STANDARD PROCEDURES: PAYNE STEWART, 1999
o THE 9/11 COMMISSION'S FUDGED TIMELlNES
o CHENEY'S TERRORISM TASK FORCE
o COVERT USES OF MILITARY EXERCISES
o AMALGAM VIRGO: COVER STORY FOR 9/11
o Military Exercises Conducted on 9/11
 1. Vigilant Guardian
 2. Vigilant Warrior
 3. Northern Vigilance
 4. Northern Guardian
 5. National Reconnaissance Office Drill
 6. Tripod II
 7. Finally, a number of jets from the Washington DC area were on an informal training flight over North Carolina on 9/11, a circumstance that took them away from the national capital airspace.
o AL QAEDA MOLES OR US GOVERNMENT MOLES?
o MODES OF STANDING DOWN
o RESIDUAL ANOMALIES
CHAPTER VI: THE COLLAPSE OF WORLD TRADE CENTER 1, 2, AND 7
o THE KEY: SECONDARY EXPLOSIONS
o NBC TAPES SHOW CONTROLLED DEMOLITION EXPLOSIONS
o FIREMEN WERE CONFIDENT OF EXTINGUISHING THE FIRE
o THE CASE OF WTC 6
o THE AGONY OF THE FDNY
o THE ROMERO ANALYSIS
o THE VIEW OF A SWISS ENGINEER
o OPPORTUNITIES FOR TAMPERING
o SEISMIC EVIDENCE
o GIULIANI OBLITERATES THE WTC CRIME SCENE
o CONTROLLED DEMOLITION AGAIN
o CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS: "BORDERLINE CRIMINAL"
o THE FEMA BPAT REPORT OF MAY 2002: "A HALF-BAKED FARCE"
o FACT CHECK
o LOIZEAUX PREDICTED THE COLLAPSE
o REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM: WTC 7
o ANOMALIES OF THE WTC COLLAPSE
 THE TWIN TOWERS WERE ROBUST STRUCTURES
CHAPTER VII: WHAT HIT THE PENTAGON?
o THE PHYSICAL EVIDENCE
o OBSTACLES IN THE FLIGHT PATH
o NO COMMERCIAL AIRLINER DEBRIS
o COVERUP
o EYEWITNESSES
o THE FIVE BELATED FRAMES OF MARCH 2002
o WHY NO AIR DEFENSE OF THE PENTAGON?
CHAPTER VIII: SHANKSVILLE
o PHYSICAL EVIDENCE
o EYEWITNESSES
o OTHER AIRCRAFT
CHAPTER IX: “ANGEL IS NEXT” – THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT SPEAKS
o ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT
o "MY PET GOAT"
o "AIR FORCE ONE IS NEXT"
o "ANGEL IS NEXT"
o BARKSDALE AND NIGHT WATCH
o OFFUTT, NEBRASKA: STRATCOM
o SAFIRE: INSIDE THE BUNKER
o BUSH AND PUTIN ON 9/11
o BAMFORD: THE US INTELLIGENCE VERSION
o THE ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE VIEW
o A CRITICAL FRENCH ACCOUNT
o THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE VIEW: NAMAKON
o SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 -- WHAT A REAL PRESIDENT WOULD HAVE SAID
o SEPTEMBER 25, 2001 -- WHAT A REAL PRESIDENT WOULD HAVE SAID
o CONCLUSIONS
o BUSH IN HELL
CHAPTER X: ANTHRAX
o THE WASHINGTON DC AREA SNIPER
CHAPTER XI: INSIDER TRADING; CELL PHONES; MI-6 AND MOSSAD
o CELL PHONE CALLS?
o CELL PHONE CALLS NOT FEASIBLE OVER 8,000 FEET
o MI-6 AND MOSSAD
o MEGA
o THE CARL CAMERON REPORTS, DECEMBER 2001
o AMDOCS
o COMVERSE INFOSYS
CHAPTER XII: CONSPIRACY THEORY: THE GREAT AMERICAN TRADITION
o THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE: CONSPIRACY THEORY
o SPOTTY LINCOLN
o THE PARANOID STYLE
o LINCOLN'S HOUSE DIVIDED SPEECH: CONSPIRACY THEORY
CHAPTER XIII: THE 9/11 MYTH: COLLECTIVE SCHIZOPHRENIA
o PLATO'S CAVE AND LOCKE'S SENSE CERTAINTY
o THE 9/11 MYTH AS MASS SCHIZOPHRENIA
o FRANK: BUSH AS MEGALOMANIAC AND SCHIZOPHRENIC
o GABEL: THE POLICE CONCEPT OF HISTORY
o WUE: CATASTROPHE FROM OUTSIDE A PERFECT SYSTEM
o SCHIZOPHRENIA: REJECTION OF HISTORY AND REALITY
o INFANTILE EGOCENTRISM AND ETHNOCENTRISM
o BUSH'S DIVINE MISSION AS SCHIZOPHRENIC SYMPTOM
o RESULT: THE 9/11 MYTH AS PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
o THE 9/11 MYTH AND THE EPIDEMIC OF AUTISM IN THE US
CHAPTER XIV: NETWORKS OF INTEREST
o LEO STRAUSS'S NIHILIST REVOLUTION: AN APOLOGY FOR TERROR
o LEO STRAUSS: BACK TO THE STONE AGE
o NEOCONS PREFER WAR TO PEACE
o NEOCONS: CUCKOLDS OF MARS
o CARL SCHMITT: POISON GAS ON GERMAN CITIES
o STRAUSS AND NIETZSCHE
o SAMUEL HUNTINGTON: IT WILL HAPPEN HERE
o ARMAGEDDON AND APOCALYPSE IN THE US MILITARY
o PRIVATE MILITARY FIRMS
o RAND CORPORATION NUCLEAR PLANNERS
o YODA: ANDREW MARSHAL, RUMSFELD'S FUTUROLOGIST
CHAPTER XV: ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM: FOSTERED BY US FOREIGN POLICY
CHAPTER XVI: ELECTION 2004 IN THE SHADOW OF SYNTHETIC TERRORISM AND WAR
o THE BUSH REGIME TALKS TERROR
o AZNAR'S ATTEMPTED TERROR-ASSISTED COUP
o KERRY EMBRACES THE TERROR MYTH
o PREPARATION FOR EMERGENCY RULE
o AN ORGY OF TERROR PROPAGANDA
o THE ANGLO-AMERICAN EMPIRE IN BREAKDOWN CRISIS
o THE NEOCONS UNDER ATTACK
o COUNTERVAILING TENDENCIES?
o TERRORIZING THE CONGRESS
o CALLING OFF THE ELECTIONS
o LARRY FRANKLIN, MOSSAD, AND IRAN
o IRAN: OCTOBER SURPRISE IN SEPTEMBER?
o US FORCES IN IRAQ AS HOSTAGES TO IRAN -- OR TO SHARON?
o ANOTHER STEP TOWARDS WORLD WAR III
o RUSSIANS EXPOSE US-UK TERROR ROLE AFTER SCHOOL MASSACRE
o "SCHOOL SEIZURE WAS PLANNED IN WASHINGTON AND LONDON"
o KMNews: CHECHEN TERROR BOSS ON US STATE DEPARTMENT PAYROLL
o KMNews: TERROR SUPPORTERS "ON THE BANKS OF THE THAMES AND THE POTOMAC"
o ANGLO-AMERICAN TERROR ULTIMATUM TO RUSSIA FROM THE LONDON ECONOMIST
o CZECH NGO BLOWS UP RUSSIAN TANK; BRITISH EXPERTS TRAIN CHECHEN GANGS
AFTERWORD: 2004: NOT AN ELECTION, BUT A CIA COVERT OPERATION
o NOT AN ELECTION, BUT A CIA COVERT OPERATION
o OHIO OUTRAGES
o THE 9/11 ISSUE WAS INDEED DECISIVE
o IRAQ AND PALESTINE: THE FUTILITY OF IMPERIALISM
o THE DEATH AGONY OF THE DOLLAR SYSTEM
o THE NEW COLD WAR WITH RUSSIA
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bush's fraudulent "war on terrorism" is of course a war of civilizations directed against the 1 billion Arab and Moslem people in the world; it is more hypocritical than Hitlerism because it assiduously denies its own real content. In reality, the "war on terrorism" is a racist war against Arabs and Moslems today, with China and perhaps Russia as candidates for all-out attack at some later time. From time to time the real essence explodes to the surface, as in Bush's call for a crusade, or in General Boykin's comments on satanic Islam. Neocon radio talk show hosts like Michael Savage are more explicit every day, and it is they who service the belief structure of Bush's hard-core followers.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 7:03 am

PART 1 OF 2

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9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA - 2nd Edition Updates, Jan. 2006

PREFACE TABLE OF CONTENTS:

• "LIHOP and MIHOP" Analyses of 9/11
• THE FIFTEEN DRILLS OF 9/11
• ABLE DANGER: 2.5 TERABYTES OF TREASON
• SAS CAR BOMBERS IN BASRA
• Appendix:
• The London Explosions, The Rogue Network, Bush, and Iran
• The Phony War on Terror: Time to Quarantine the Real Aggressors

(The actual book also includes new illustrations and an expanded index.)

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

"Why the thermonuclear mushroom cloud on the cover?" That question has come from a number of readers of this book, who probably expected to find the more usual photographs of the World Trade Center tragedy, or the explosions at the Pentagon which are seen on the covers of other 9/11 books. The mushroom cloud is there to signal that this book is concerned not only with what did happen on 9/11, but with also with larger tragedies which came close to happening, but which ultimately did not occur. Among these was the threat of thermonuclear escalation among the great powers. Important material which has come to light during 2005, after the first edition of this book was published, provides decisive support for this avenue of inquiry, and to this new material we will turn presently.

But first, a note on methodology. This book argues the rogue network MIHOP ("made it happen on purpose") position. That is to say, it represents the analytical point of view which sees the events of September 11, 2001 as a deliberate provocation manufactured by an outlaw network of high officials infesting the military and security apparatus of the United States and Great Britain, a network ultimately dominated by Wall Street and City of London financiers. It is our contention that any other approach not only misrepresents what actually happened in the terror attacks, but also must tend to leave the public naive and helpless when it comes to identifying the present and future threat of state-sponsored, false flag synthetic terrorism, and therefore preventing repeat performances of 9/11, including on a far larger scale.

What are the alternatives to MIHOP? There is of course the official version as codified in the Kean-Hamilton commission report of July 2004, notoriously a tissue of lies. A demagogic variation on this is the "official version and it serves you right" or "blowback" position, which accepts all the crucial elements of the official version -- Bin Laden, Atta and the rest of the 19 hijackers, al Qaeda, the US intelligence failure, and so forth. But here the official version is endorsed with its moral signs inverted: the catastrophe of 9/11 is seen as just retribution by the victims of imperialism for the chronic crimes of the system. This is the thesis which, in understated form, underlies the approach of Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal, as the first edition made clear. "Blowback" is dear to the hearts of a whole series of left gatekeepers, to the extent that they are willing to say anything at all about 9/11. This view has been embraced in the most grotesque form by the veteran agent provocateur Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado.

Churchill learned demolitions during his career in the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols in Vietnam, and upon his return from the war became associated with the terrorist Weatherman faction, the group of police agents who systematically destroyed Students for a Democratic Society, the largest leftist membership organization in the US in the twentieth century. "Churchill briefly taught the Weathermen and Weatherwomen how to make bombs and how to fire weapons," we read in the Denver Post of January 18, 1987 ( http://www.khow.com/img/churchill-scan.html ) Some of these Weathermen perished when they blew up a townhouse in Manhattan; they had not been well taught.

During the first few months of 2005, the Fox News O 'Reilly Factor attempted to promote Churchill to the status of chief spokesman for the 9/11 truth movement by paying obsessive attention to his demagogic claims that the office workers who perished on 9/11 were war criminals in the service of imperialism. With this, the 9/1l truth movement was demonized in the eyes of millions. More important for our purposes here, Churchill also ranted that anyone who rejected the attribution of the crimes of 9/11 to Atta, Bin Laden, and al Qaeda was a racist who was really arguing that Arabs were genetically inferior and thus incapable of carrying out this complex and spectacular attack. Churchill is thus the leading contender for the Arlen Spector Award for the most imaginative defense of the official version so far recorded. Academics, in particular, seemed unable to see him for what he was. His posturing, which was given lavish attention by the corporate media, did more than anything else to discredit and disorient the 9/11 truth movement, precisely at a time when an advertising campaign by the political philanthropist Jimmy Walter was actually beginning to educate the public about how it had been hoodwinked.

Other commentators tentatively accept the 9/11 commission report, but hasten to add that they have unanswered questions. "Official version with unanswered questions" is the most nondescript of views, and it has not stood the test of time. Unanswered questions were a mark of courage in October 2001, and were still a healthy symptom in 2002. By 2004 this position had been rendered obsolete and untenable by the progress of research, and by 2005 it had come to embody a basic refusal to understand, whether out of fear or prejudice. But the "unanswered questions" gambit remained popular, perhaps because it was quite compatible with the continued receipt of foundation funding. On Judgment Day, when Gabriel blows his horn and the dead rise from their sepulchers, this contingent will still be parading their unanswered questions as an alibi for their political impotence and paralysis.

"Let it happen on purpose" (LIHOP) is a better analysis, although ultimately an inadequate one. LIHOP assumes that Bin Laden, al Qaeda, Atta, and company actually have at least a semi-independent existence and possess the will and the physical- technical capability to strike the United States in the ways seen on 9/11. But LIHOP also posits that the al Qaeda attack could not have been successful without the active cooperation of elements of the Pentagon and Bush administration who deliberately sabotaged US air defenses so as to allow the suicide pilots to reach their targets at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The LIHOP view of things has been vociferously and voluminously defended by Mike Ruppert, whose book features the constant refrain borrowed from Delmart "Mike" Vreeland, "Let one happen. Stop the rest!" Nafeez Ahmed's first book also verged on LIHOP.

LIHOP is increasingly at war with masses of evidence. A more outre version of LIHOP admits that Atta and his cohorts were working for the CIA, but only as gun-runners and drug- runners, not terrorists. At a certain point, this view alleges, the drug- runners decided to revolt against their arrogant CIA masters by blowing up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon! But even this recondite scheme cannot address the absence of air defense for one hour and forty-five minutes, nor the controlled demolition which overtook the two trade towers.

In 2002 and 2003, LIHOP represented progress beyond the unanswered questions way station. But here too, as more new material has come to light, LIHOP has also become untenable, as I will try to show below. A Zogby poll commissioned by Jimmy Walter in August 2004 showed that almost 50% of New Yorkers believed that US officials knew in advance that 9/11 was going to happen -- a reasonable approximation of LIHOP. The statement by MI-5 whistleblower David Shayler to a London gathering in early June 2005 -- "I was LIHOP; I am MIHOP," -- is therefore coherent with the increasingly successful quest for truth. Today the LIHOP position is increasingly unstable. Some devotees of LIHOP have a curious habit of reverting to a very tepid unanswered questions posture as soon as a microphone or television camera approaches.

David Ray Griffin's New Pearl Harbor exemplified what might be called Bush-Cheney MIHOP, although this must be qualified by Griffin's repeated caveat that he was not advancing an overall explanation for what happened on 9/11. The emphasis on Bush-Cheney as the possible masterminds of 9/11 is problematic, since the rogue network has demonstrably been around since the blowing up of the USS Maine more than a century ago -- long before Bush and Cheney. In addition, we must ask if serious plotters would ever dream of assigning an important role to a moron, or to a man who has had multiple heart attacks, who has had a pacemaker installed and who is living on borrowed time. These objections apply to all allegations that assign Cheney an absolutely central role, including those of Mike Ruppert. The invisible government, in fact, will not necessarily be defeated if its puppets of the moment -- Bush, Cheney, and company -- are ousted. Griffin then turned to a detailed refutation of the Kean- Hamilton report, a task that could easily have been left to the unanswered questions people or even relegated as fiction to literary critics, as Griffin himself has suggested. We are left with Griffin's basically agnostic view, which means that we are effectively disarmed in the face of new threats of state-sponsored terrorism as they continued to emerge, especially during the second half of 2005.

Differences among these categories are worth stressing, even though they may be blurred. For example, a successful terrorist provocation generally has a LIHOP function built into it, since it typically is the job of the moles in the FBI and Justice Department to make sure that normal law enforcement does not interfere with the patsies and throw them into jail, thus stripping the operation of its indispensable scapegoats. But this is only one part of the terror deployment, and the presence of trained professionals who actually produce the results observed, which the patsies could never produce, suffices to validate a MIHOP analysis for the entire operation.

Some other commentators have, either consciously or unconsciously, advanced an outlook which might be called Mossad MIHOP. As I show in this book, it is a well-established fact that the Mossad meticulously observed every phase of the preparation and execution of 9/11. The Mossad is also known to be a very nefarious organization. But what is missing is convincing proof of a direct operative role for the Mossad in 9/11. So far not even limited subcontracting of specific 9/11 tasks by CIA to Mossad, a standard practice, has been established. Mossad MIHOP would appear to appeal to a chauvinistic mentality which implicitly believes that Americans would never do such a thing to their fellow Americans, so a foreign group, the Mossad, has to be blamed. This is dangerous nonsense, and those who profess it need to be reminded of the Operation Northwoods documents, which contemplate precisely the sort of killing of Americans by Americans they think is impossible. As far as I know, MI-6 MIHOP, another possible variant, has not been argued; here the evidence is greater, but still not enough. Therefore, my second edition still asserts on the cover that the 9/11 terror was: "Made In USA."

THE FIFTEEN DRILLS OF 9/11

Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon is aware of five exercises related to 9/11 -- Vigilant Warrior, Vigilant Guardian, Northern Vigilance, Tripod II, and the National Reconnaissance Office drill. The first printing of my book discusses these, plus Northern Guardian, Amalgam Virgo, and a local DC-area drill, for a total of eight. As of this writing, it has been established that there were as many as 15 drills either ongoing on 9/11 or directly related to the events of that day. This figure may be slightly higher or lower according to the counting criteria used.

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911 WAR GAMES AND TERROR DRILLS

Amalgam Virgo -- Air defense against rogue state/terror cruise missiles, hijackings
Vigilant Guardian -- Air defense against hijacking
Northern Guardian -- Air defense
Vigilant Warrior -- NORAD exercise
Northern Vigilance -- NORAD deploys fighters to Alaska, northern Canada
Amalgam Warrior -- Large live-fly air defense and air intercept, tracking surveillance
Global Guardian -- Nuclear warfighting, "Armageddon"
Crown Vigilance -- Air combat command exercise
Apollo Guardian -- Large scale live-fly air defense and air intercept, tracking surveillance
National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) -- Crashing planes into buildings
AWACS -- AWACS over Florida, Washington DC
Fort Meyer, Virginia -- Firemen (Pentagon), "aircraft crash refresher course" for firefighters
TRIPOD II, Manhattan -- Response to biochemical attack
Timely Alert II -- Emergency response to bomb attack


Ruppert focuses exclusively on the drills which crippled air defense, the ones we may call LIHOP drills. It is of course vital to know about these war games which moved fighter planes to northern Canada and Alaska, which introduced fake radar blips on the screens of military personnel, and which deployed civilian and military aircraft in the guise of hijacked airliners. This was one way the vaunted US air defense in the northeast corridor was paralyzed for about one hour and forty-five minutes. But even this argument has limits. Loyal military officers would have positioned their interceptor assets in the skies over Washington DC to prevent their recurrent nightmare, the decapitation of the national command authority by a lightning stroke. The fact that this was not done for so many minutes is irrefutable evidence that the commanders were not loyal. It does no good to argue that red-blooded US fighter pilots would never have obeyed a stand-down order when this is manifestly exactly what they did, for the critical hour and three quarters.

But there are additional 9/11 maneuvers which claim our attention. These are the MIHOP drills, which provided cover and operational capabilities for terror operations run through the official bureaucracy. The most obvious is the exercise that morning at the headquarters of the National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly, Virginia involving the simulation of an airliner crashing into the NRO's headquarters tower. It involved, in other words, a plane crashing into a building. Given all we have learned about the intimate relationship between military drills and terrorist acts, it is clear that there is a strong prima facie case here that the NRO drill in question was in fact a control center or vehicle for crashing aircraft or other flying objects into the towers of the World Trade Center. This is no weird happenstance, but a crucial window on the entire operation.

Then there is the case of Amalgam Virgo, which did come up during the 9/11 commission hearings. Thanks to cooperativeresearch.org, we know that Amalgam Virgo 01 was run on June 1-2, 2001. It was "a multi-agency planning exercise sponsored by NORAD involving the hypothetical scenario of a cruise missile being launched by "a rogue [government] or somebody" from a barge off the East Coast. Bin Laden is pictured on the cover of the proposal for the exercise. [American Forces Press Service, 6/4/02] The exercise takes place at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. [Global Security, 4/14/02]" Although the barge could have been located somewhere else, this looks very much like what happened at the Pentagon, since it is clear that no commercial airliner ever hit that building on 9/11. The 2002 edition of this exercise was set to include "two simultaneous commercial aircraft hijackings," with FBI agents impersonating the hijackers -- another component which may have occurred in the real world on 9/11.

These are leading examples of what may be termed MIHOP drills, since they point towards the basic fact that the 9/11 terror operations were not just facilitated or allowed, but manufactured and produced, by activities taking place inside the US military- security bureaucracy, under the cover of theoretically legal and sanctioned drills.

As I showed in the original edition, the open secret about drills is that they often hide the real thing, as illustrated by the examples of Hilex 75 (a cover for possible nuclear confrontation with the Warsaw Pact) and Nine Lives 81 (a cover for the Hinckley hit on President Reagan). Another excellent example is Able Archer 83, a US nuclear weapons exercise which looked so realistic that Soviet leaders became concerned that it was a cover for a real sneak attack on their country with nuclear missiles. They put their own Strategic Rocket Troops and related units on highest alert, and the world found itself on the brink of an all-out nuclear exchange. (See William M. Arkin, Code Names (Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2005, p. 245, and Benjamin B. Fischer, A Cold War Conundrum, History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1997, online at http://www.cia.gov/csi/monograph/coldwar/source.htm ).

The principle directly at stake here is that state terrorists wishing to conduct an illegal terror operation often find it highly advantageous to conduit or bootleg that illegal operation through the government military/security bureaucracy with the help of an exercise or drill that closely resembles or mimics the illegal operation. Once the entire apparatus is set up, it is only necessary to make apparently small changes to have the exercise go live, and turn into a real hecatomb. If there is a gas dispersion drill announced in Manhattan, as there was in August 2005, it is merely necessary to replace the inert gas with a highly toxic one to go from drill to mass slaughter. A drill simulating a terror attack provides the greatest possible camouflage of the criminal intent of the perpetrators and allows the terror attack to occur through minor departures from the scenario script. All these drills try to be as realistic as possible. But the greatest realism is an actual terror attack. The fact that attempts at disruption, infiltration, harassment, and sabotage may be built in simply increases the opportunities available to the plotters, as do the varying levels of awareness of the participants, only a very few of whom need to know that a real terror attack is intended, or what the fate of certain patsies might be. To prevent new terror attacks from providing the pretexts for new wars, it is imperative that this mechanism be understood, but it cannot be understood in the unanswered questions, LIHOP, and agnostic frames of reference. That is why the apparent moderation of these theoretical points of view is so crippling and so dangerous.

Thanks to Arkin and cooperativeresearch.org, there is another 9/11 drill which can be given the special mention it deserves. My book more than any other stresses the thermonuclear war potentials unleashed on 9/11, and this emphasis is fully vindicated by this additional drill. In effect, the mushroom cloud on the cover was there for excellent reasons. The heart of the matter is Global Guardian, a nuclear war fighting or Armageddon exercise staged by STRATCOM on 9/11 from Offutt Air Force Base, where Brent Scowcroft and Warren Buffett were converging in what might have been the nucleus of a Committee of Public Safety set to govern in case Bush had to be ousted. Global Guardian involved land-based missiles, nuclear submarines, and B-52 and B-l bombers loaded with live H-bombs at bases like Offutt (Nebraska), Barksdale (Louisiana), Minot (North Dakota) and Whiteman (Missouri). The first two became destinations for Bush that day. The Doomsday-Night-Watch-Looking Glass flying command posts were mobilized. Another crucial aspect is pointed out by cooperativeresearch.com:

A 1998 Defense Department newsletter reported that for several years Stratcom had been incorporating a computer network attack (CNA) into Global Guardian. The attack involved Stratcom "red team" members and other organizations acting as enemy agents, and included attempts to penetrate the Command using the Internet and a "bad" insider who had access to a key command and control system. The attackers "war dialed" the phones to tie them up and sent faxes to numerous fax machines throughout the Command. They also claimed they were able to shut down Stratcom's systems. Reportedly, Stratcom planned to increase the level of computer network attack in future Global Guardian exercises. (IAnewsletter, 6/98]


Here is a portal through which the rogue network could have launched nuclear missiles without the help of Bush, as I argued in the original edition. The targets for such missiles could have been Arab or Islamic capitals, if Bush had refused to initiate the war of civilizations in conventional form by attacking Afghanistan. The target could also have been China, or Russia. We must never lose sight of the Bush-Putin telephone call on 9/11, which was the central diplomatic and strategic event of the day even though most 9/11 books do not even mention it. In that telephone call, Bush in effect delivered an ultimatum that the United States was determined to seize Afghanistan (where the Soviets had staged an invasion and a long war in response to a grab for power by Brzezinski in 1979), plus bases in former Soviet central Asia. What if Putin' s response to Bush's ultimatum had been a more traditional defense of Mother Russia, coupled with a threat to incinerate New York if Bush dared to do any such thing? The rogue network had obviously thought of that eventuality in advance, and had evidently provided a back door through which they could direct a confrontation.

ABLE DANGER: 2.5 TERABYTES OF TREASON

Another important MIHOP issue emerges from these drills. Able Warrior, according to Arkin's listing, would seem to represent the big Special Forces (SOCOM) "anti-terror" defensive drill of each fiscal year. Keeping in mind the military bureaucracy's predilection for naming drills in binary pairs, we might speculate as to the meaning of a drill or activity known as Able Danger. The name would suggest that this might be the simulated attacker paired with the defensive Able Warrior. In other words, Able Danger might represent the case officers and terrorist controllers for a group of government-run terrorists (double agents, plus dupes, fanatics, and criminal energy types) used to play the roles of terrorists in the various anti-terror drills. Does the reader smell a fault?

Such suspicions materialized in August 2005 when Congressman Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania began holding press conferences about Able Danger, which turned out to be a co-production of the Special Forces command with the Defense Intelligence Agency. Weldon's main interest was in the report from a certain Col. Schaffer and a certain Navy Captain Philpott that Able Danger had been well aware of the presence of Mohamed Atta in the United States during the early months of 2000, long before the Kean-Hamilton commission said he had arrived. The Able Danger officers produced detailed accounts of how they told the 9/11 commission investigators all about this, only to see their testimony completely ignored. In a grotesque comedy of errors, Kean, Hamilton and their hack apparatus clumsily denied these allegations, then retracted the denial, then denied them again. The role of Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 commission staff, was especially slimy, which should have come as no surprise to readers of this book. The first by-product of Congressman Weldon's maverick performance was thus to provide an absolutely water-tight case study in how, when dealing with highly material information, the 9/11 commission had suppressed evidence, obstructed justice, and deliberately and systematically lied. What else could one expect from Zelikow, the unfortunate Miss Rice's partner in a book venture?

But that was just the beginning. Weldon admitted that, in addition to observing and combating the supposed terrorists, one task of Able Danger had been to "manipulate" them. With this one word, the door was wide open to deploying terrorist counter- gangs and pseudo-gangs on the full Frank Kitson model for real live terror operations. Able Danger were indeed the terrorist controllers and case officers for Atta and the rest. This case was made harder to prove when Able Danger successfully destroyed its own database and records, to the tune of an estimated 2.5 terabytes of material -- according to some experts, the approximate equivalent of one quarter of all the books and other records stored in the Library of Congress. Suddenly, all the reports of Atta and the others living on military bases, studying on military bases, and so forth began to fit into place.

During 2005, the hollow demagogy and hypocrisy of the phony US-UK war on terror emerged for all to see. Elias Achmadov, a Chechen butcher and terrorist, was living in Washington DC, not only openly, but enjoying a generous stipend from the US State Department, complete with an office, a secretary, a travel budget, and a public relations budget courtesy of the American taxpayer. The State Department pays terrorists -- there was no longer any doubt, after Achmadov got his picture on the cover of the Washington Post weekly magazine. Then there was Luis Posada Carriles, a long-serving retainer of the Bush family, most recently attached to Jeb Bush's Florida gun-running and drug-running apparatus. Posada had blown up a Cuban airliner, killing upwards of 75 people. Posada was living openly in the US for several months despite being a very illegal alien when the international heat from Cuba, Venezuela, and other states made this CIA terror asset too compromising to be allowed to roam free. He was accordingly detained, but not extradited to those who wanted to put him on trial.

SAS CAR BOMBERS IN BASRA

Even more dramatic were the terrorist counter-gang operations of the US and UK military in Iraq. In September 2005 two soldiers of the British Special Air Services (SAS) were arrested for sniping at civilians in Basra. These two, who were members of a super-elite unit called Special Reconnaissance Regiment, were driving around in a car bomb which they doubtless intended to set off near a Shiite school, hospital, or mosque. At this time, the US-UK terrorist countergang leader had declared war against all Shiites -- a stance so outrageous for a supposed Iraqi fighter that it drew a reproof from MI-6's Zawahiri. When the Iraqi police arrested this pair, the British sent a column of tanks to break down the jail and extract them, lest they tell all. These two killer provocateurs were living proof that the US-UK occupation of Iraq was using terrorist countergangs and agents provocateurs in a bid to isolate and demonize the national resistance. These techniques had been refined by UK Colonel Frank Kitson in Kenya during the early 1950s Mau Mau era, and coifed in Kitson's book on low intensity warfare. It was Kitson who had coined the immensely useful term countergang (or pseudogang). If you want to discredit a clandestine organization, then set up your own false-flag group under the same name, and have them commit unspeakable atrocities in the name of the target group. If the SAS-SRR car bomb had claimed its toll of Shiites, the usual Limbaugh-O'Reilly-Hannity-Savage chorus of fascist parrots would have been on the air the next day denouncing the Sunnis as a criminal race. We may assume that a large part of the beheadings and other spectacular atrocities coming out of Iraq were in fact perpetrated by US-UK-Mossad, acting through these obvious countergangs.

As I argued in the first edition of this book, there was acute danger of large-scale state-sponsored terrorist provocation, followed by a wider war in the Middle East or elsewhere during the months before the November 2004 US elections. The general outlines of this analysis were confirmed in a conversation with the author in the shadow of the Washington monument on September 25, 2005: Wayne Madsen reported that he had detected signs of intensive preparations in numerous US commands during that time frame, including especially on aircraft carriers.

May-July 2005 began a similar time of heightened risk of US aggression. In late July, an article by former CIA agent Philip Giraldi in The American Conservative signaled that the Cheney faction had ordered the Pentagon to prepare for the atomic bombing of Iran in the wake of a new 9/11 terror attack. It was clear that the Cheneyacs would not wait for a new 9/11 to happen, but would have it delivered on special order. In response to this, a group of activists around the websites team8plus.org and tota1411.info, with help from my weekly broadcasts, began to look forward in time to identify terror drills and war games which might lend themselves to use as war provocations.

This was an effort to put the MIHOP lessons learned from the study of 9/11 into action to shut down the terrorist controllers. The cover for the Kennedy assassination was Operation Mongoose. The hit on Reagan in 1981 had been conduited through Nine Lives, a presidential succession exercise. We have seen the drills on 9/11. The London July 7, 2005 bombs (see http://www.waronfreedom.org/777.htm ) were set up under Atlantic Blue, Topoff III, and Triple Play, plus help from Visor Consultants. What would be the drill that would serve as the vehicle for Cheney's desired war provocation?

Activists soon discovered Sudden Response 05, based on a 10-kiloton nuclear explosion in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. The websites mentioned raised such a hue and cry about this drill, forcing an article in the main local newspaper trying to calm worried people down. The exposure worked well enough to cause the drill to be shut down before its completion. This was followed by a terror drill involving explosions in San Francisco Bay; a strange blast in the financial district at the end of this drill sent a woman to the hospital in critical condition. Then came Granite Shadow/Power Geyser in Washington DC, with weapons of mass destruction and overtones of a military coup. All of these exercises were made more sinister by the shift of the official US strategic nuclear posture from deterrence and retaliation to global strike, meaning nuclear sneak attack, under CONPLAN 8022-22.

The last months of 2005 were therefore a dangerous time. By some calculations, this period was marked by the greatest density of war game and terror drill activity since 9/11 itself. The vaguely reassuring Global Guardian was replaced by the much more aggressive and threatening Global Storm, presumably as a result of the shift to the global strike posture. Global Storm embraces worldwide nuclear war using all arms. Occurring simultaneously with this were Positive Response 06 (the drills go by fiscal years, and the US fiscal year begins on October 1), a Joint Chiefs of Staff interoperability exercise. These were paired with Global Lightning, Vigilant Shield, and Busy Night Seminars -- a code name for nuclear warfare. Scenarios at work here included a radiological dirty bomb detonated in Mobile Bay, Alabama, by a country or terror network designated as Purple, but identified with the DPRK (North Korea). North Korea was supposed to launch long-range missiles at the US, with subsequent retaliation. The Pentagon's primitive missile defense system was supposed to come into play. At the same time, other drills saw the US intervening massively in Ukraine, eliciting a Russian defensive response, thus precipitating all-out nuclear war.

Small wonder therefore that Russian President Putin had issued a blunt warning of his own on August 17, 2005, admonishing Bush:

"I think that lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear arms is a dangerous trend, because somebody may feel tempted to use nuclear weapons ... If that happens, the next step can be taken -- more powerful nuclear arms can be used, which may lead to a nuclear conflict. This extremely dangerous trend is in the back of the mind of some politicians and military officials."


Persons of good will needed to scan the websites of the Pentagon, Homeland Security, the CIA, NATO, the British Defense Ministry, and similar organizations to identify drills and exercises that were likely to go live. These drills and war games needed to be denounced, exposed, and shut down. Activists of all types, from the anti-war to the neighborhood level, needed to join the growing movement to prevent the outrageous and illegal abuse of drills and exercises for purposes of terrorism, among other things by contributing to the drill monitoring set up by the Independent International Commission on 9/11 at web sites like team8plus.org.. This kind of aggressive and pre-emptive vigilance represents MIHOP in action. The purpose of such preemptive exposure and denunciation is not to gather kudos for how smart we are, but rather to identify, shut down, and dismantle the rogue network's illegal terror operations.

It was clearly essential that measures be taken to keep the fingers of Bush, Cheney, and the increasingly desperate neocon fascist madmen away from the nuclear button. During Watergate, when Nixon had called his infamous 1973 worldwide nuclear alert as a result of the October 1973 Middle East war, British Prime Minister Ted Heath had seen the entire stunt as a manufactured diversion from Nixon's Watergate troubles at home. As the Bush administration disintegrates, it is clear that conditions today are similar. On October 28, 2005, when special counsel Fitzgerald presented his indictment of the neocon fanatic Irv Lewis Libby, Bush simultaneously made a raving speech branding Iran and Syria as outlaw states with whom his patience was exhausted. Many cable networks showed Fitzgerald and Bush, along with Cheney, as parts of the same split screen. There it was: wag the dog, in real time. Kissinger and Haig, sociopaths though they were, had taken measures to supervise Nixon's access to the football, the briefcase containing the nuclear launch codes. In the last weeks of Watergate, Defense Secretary Schlesinger had issued a standing order to combat commanders telling them to ignore any and all orders by Nixon to launch attacks unless and until they were confirmed by himself or by Kissinger. In today's White House, there are no figures to look to who might impose similar restraint: quite the contrary. Faced with looming indictments of many of their clique, the neocons tended towards a mood of Gotterdammerung and apocalypse. The neocons would doubtless prefer a new world war to life behind bars; like the SS in Berlin during the last days, they would think nothing of letting the river water into the subway tunnels where their insufficiently martial fellow citizens were hiding.

The impeachment of Bush and of many others could hardly wait until 2007.

Gunpowder Day, November 5, 2005
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 7:04 am

PART 2 OF 2 (Preface Cont'd.)

Appendix: The London Explosions, The Rogue Network, Bush, and Iran
By Webster G. Tarpley

Originally published in Global Outlook magazine.

Washington DC, July 11 -- Last week's London explosions carry the characteristic features of a state-sponsored, false flag, synthetic terror provocation by networks within the British intelligence services MI-5, MI-6, the Home Office, and the Metropolitan Police Special Branch who are favorable to a wider Anglo-American aggressive war in the Middle East, featuring especially an early pre-emptive attack on Iran, with a separate option on North Korea also included. With the London attacks, the Anglo-American invisible government adds another horrendous crime to its own dossier. But this time, their operations appear imperfect, especially in regard to the lack (so far) of a credible patsy group which, by virtue of its ethnicity, could direct popular anger against one of the invisible government's targets. So far, the entire attribution of the London crimes depends on what amounts to an anonymous posting in an obscure, hitherto unknown, secular Arabic-language chatroom in the state of Maryland, USA. But, based on this wretched shred of pseudo-evidence, British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- who has surely heard of a group called the Irish Republican Army, which bombed London for more than a decade -- has not hesitated to ascribe the murders to "Islam," and seems to be flirting with total martial law under the Civil Contingencies Act. We are reminded once again of how he earned his nickname of Tony Blair.

SCOTLAND YARD KNEW IN ADVANCE

That the British Government knew in advance that blasts would occur is not open to rational doubt. Within hours of the explosions, Israeli Army Radio was reporting that "Scotland Yard [London police headquarters] had intelligence warnings of the attacks a short time before they occurred." This report, repeated by IsraelNN.com, added that "the Israeli Embassy in London was notified in advance, resulting in Foreign Minister Binyamin Netanyahu remaining in his hotel room rather than make his way to the hotel adjacent to the site of the first explosion, a Liverpool Street train station, where he was to address an economic summit." This report is attributed to "unconfirmed reliable sources." At around the same time, the Associated Press issued a wire asserting that "British police told the Israeli Embassy in London minutes before Thursday's explosions that they had received warnings of possible terror attacks in the city," according to "a senior Israeli official." This wire specifies that "just before the blasts, Scotland Yard called the security officer at the Israeli Embassy to say that they had received warnings of possible attacks "

According to eyewitness reports from London, BBC claimed between 8:45 and some minutes after 10 AM that the incidents in the Underground were the result of an electrical power surge, or alternatively of a collision. Foreign bigwigs, presumably not just Netanyahu, were warned, while London working people continued to stream into the subway. These reports have been denied, repudiated, sanitized, and expunged from news media websites by the modern Orwellian Thought Police, but they have been archived by analysts who learned on 9/11 and other occasions that key evidence in state-sponsored terror crimes tends to filter out during the first minutes and hours, during the critical interval when the controlled media are assimilating the cover story peddled by complicit moles within the ministries. These reports are not at all damaging to Israel, but are devastating for British domestic security organs. An alternative version peddled by Stratfor.com, namely that the Israelis warned Scotland Yard, is most probably spurious but still leaves the British authorities on the hook. Which Scotland Yard official made the calls? Identify that official, and you have bagged a real live rogue network mole.

Another more general element of foreknowledge can be seen in the fact reported by Isikoff and Hosenball of Newsweek that, since about November 2004, the US FBI, but not other US agencies, has been refusing to use the London Underground.

Operations like these are generally conduited through the government bureaucracies under the cover of a drill or exercise which closely resembles the terror operation itself. So it was with Amalgam Virgo and the multiple exercises held on 9/11, as I show in my 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA (Joshua Tree CA: Progressive Press, 2005). So it was with the Hinckley attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan, when a presidential succession exercise was scheduled for the next day, as I showed in my George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (1992; reprint by Progressive Press, 2004). An uncannily similar maneuver allows the necessary work to be done on official computers and on company time, while warding off the inquisitive glances and questions of curious co-workers at adjoining computer consoles.

THE COVER STORY TERROR DRILL

Such a parallel drill was not lacking in the London case. On the evening of July 7, BBC Five, a news and sports radio program, carried an interview with a certain former Scotland Yard official named Peter Power who related that his firm, Visor Consulting, had been doing an anti-terror-bombing drill in precisely the Underground stations and at the precise times when the real explosions went off. Peter Power and Visor had been subcontractors for the drill; Power declined to name the prime contractors. Small wonder that Blair, in his first official report to the Commons on July 11, went out of his way to rule out a board of inquiry to probe these tragic events.

Tony Blair may be eyeing the advantages of emergency rule for a discredited lame duck like himself, but the British people may have a different view. The alternative is clear: on the one hand is the American response after 9/11, marked by submissive and credulous gullibility in regard to the fantastic official story of what had happened. On the other hand is the militant and intelligent Spanish response after March 11, 2004, marked by powerful mass mobilization and righteous anger against politicians who sought to manipulate the people and sell a distorted account of events. Which way will the British people go? Straws in the wind suggest that the British response may be closer to the Spanish, although it may develop more slowly because of the lack of mass organization and related factors. If this is the case, Tony Blair, Jack Straw, and the rest of the malodorous "New Labor" crypto-Thatcherites will be out the window.

My thesis is that the London explosions represent a form of communication on the part of the transatlantic Anglo-American financier faction with Bush, Blair, and the heads of state and government assembled at Gleneagles, Scotland for the G-8 meeting on the day of the blast. The London deaths were designed to deliver an ultimatum in favor of early war with Iran. Here a word of clarification may be necessary. The demonization of Bush by his many enemies, while understandable, risks blurring the basic realities of power in the US and UK. Since the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy assassination (to go back no further than that), we have been aware of a secret team. During the Iran-contra era, the same phenomenon was referred to as an invisible, secret or parallel government. This is still the matrix of most large-scale terrorism. The question arises for some: do Bush and Cheney tell the invisible government what to do, or does the invisible government treat the visible office holders as puppets and expendable assets? To ask the question is to answer it: Bush, Cheney & Co. are the expendable puppets. The explanation of terror is not Bush "makes it happen on purpose," or "MIHOP," as some seem to argue, but rather invisible government MIHOP, an altogether more dire proposition.

How then does the invisible faction communicate with the public mouthpieces? Given the violence of the power relations involved, we can be sure that it is not a matter of sending out engraved invitations announcing that the honor of Bush's presence is requested at the launching of an attack on Iran. Rather, the invisible and violent rogue network communicates with Bush, Blair, and others by means coherent with their aggressive nature -- as they did on 9/11. Bush, of course, is a weak and passive tenant of the White House whose instinct is to do virtually nothing beyond the day-to-day routine.

We therefore need to note that the London blasts come after two months of vigorous and impatient prodding of Bush by the invisible government. On May 11, a small plane almost reached the White House before it was turned away, while the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House (but not the Pentagon, the Treasury, etc.) were evacuated amid scenes of panic. The White House went to red alert, but Bush was not informed until it was all over, and was riding his bicycle in the woods near Greenbelt, Maryland. Flares were dropped over the Brookland district and Takoma Park, MD. The resemblance of all this to a classic coup scenario was evident. On May 18, a live hand grenade, which turned out to be a dud, landed near Bush as he spoke at a rally in Tbilisi, Georgia.

On June 29, the approach of another small plane led to an evacuation of the Congress and the Capitol, again with scenes of panic. On the afternoon of July 2, no fewer than three small planes came close to Bush's Camp David retreat in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland; this story was suspiciously relegated to the local news page of the Washington Post. The details of these incidents are of little interest; what counts is the objective reality of a pattern. These incidents also provide background for Bush's unbalanced behavior on July 5 at Gleneagles, when he crashed into a policeman while riding on his bicycle. Then came the London blasts on July 7.

What is it that the invisible government wants Bush and Blair to do? Scott Ritter announced last January that Bush had issued an order to prepare an attack on Iran for the month of June. According to a well-informed retired CIA analyst I spoke with on July 3, this order actually told US commanders to be ready to attack Iran by the end of June. This project of war with Iran is coherent with most of what we know about the intentions of the US-UK rogue faction, and thus provides the immediate background for the London explosions. The Bush administration and the Blair cabinet have failed to deliver decisive military action, and the invisible government is exceedingly impatient.

One way to increase the pressure on Iran would be to implicate a group of Iranian fanatic patsies in the London bombings. This would not be difficult; in fact, as I show in 9/11 Synthetic Terror, the British capital, referred to during the 1990s as Londonistan, is home to the largest concentration of Arab and Islamic patsy groups in the entire world, in such infamous locations as Finsbury mosque and Brixton mosque; these groups are known to have enjoyed de facto recruiting privileges in Her Majesty's Prisons. But perhaps an Iranian patsy group would be too obvious at this time. More likely may be the sinking of a US warship in the Gulf by a third country, duly attributed to Iran.

In a recent speech, Dr. Ephraim Asculai of Tel Aviv University made two main points: first, that there is no military solution to the Iranian nuclear issue, and second, that there is no such thing as a point of no return in nuclear weapons development. Dr. Asculai showed that South Africa, Sweden, and other nations had turned away from deploying A- bombs well after having acquired the ability to produce them. Dr. Asculai is evidently arguing against widespread tendencies in the US-UK-Israeli strategic community who are whipping up hysteria around the notion that Iran is now indeed approaching exactly such a point of no return.

For her part, Miss Rice of the State Department has now declared that it will no longer be sufficient for Iran to turn away from nuclear weapons production; the entire Iranian program for nuclear energy production will also have to be dismantled, in her view. Such maximalism makes a negotiated solution impossible as long as the current Washington group holds power.

SCO: US GET OUT OF CENTRAL ASIA

The US, UK and Israel have been on the brink of war with Iran for at least a year, and the rogue network is generally aware that time is not on its side. There is also an important new development which threatens the ability of the Anglo-Americans to wage war. On July 5, the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which brings together China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Krygyzia, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan plus new members India, Pakistan, and Iran, issued a call for the United States to vacate the bases seized in the autumn of 2001 under the cover of the 9/11 emergency and the looming invasion of Afghanistan. The parties to this call represent about half of the world's population. This demand was immediately rejected by the State Department, but veteran Russian Eurasian expert Yevgeny Primakov crowed that for the first time a formula had been agreed to by which the US would be ejected from this region. The US presence goes back to the Bush-Putin emergency hotwire talks of September 11, 2001, when Putin, seeing that the madmen had seized control in Washington, dropped Russian objections to a US intrusion into the former Soviet republics of central Asia. The US-UK can attack Iran from Iraq in the west, from Afghanistan in the east, and from Qatar in the south, but without the Uzbek and Kyrgyz bases, the Anglo-American ability to attack from the north as well will be severely limited.

The SCO states are also concerned about US-backed "designer color revolutions" on the recent Georgian (rose) and Ukrainian (orange) models, traditionally known as CIA "people power" revolutions, being used to destabilize their governments. To make matters worse for Washington and London, Kazakhstan is a few months away from opening an oil pipeline to China, which will diminish the US-UK ability to use their Gulf presence to blackmail Beijing. Washington and London are also dismayed by the pro-Iranian overtures in various fields being made by their Shiite puppets in Baghdad.

And what of the report in the Washington Post of July 11, which claims that US and UK planners are now contemplating a sharp reduction in the US forces in Iraq? The most plausible explanation is that this is pure disinformation, similar to news blips issued by both Hitler and Stalin in May and June of 1941. It should also be noted that the British plan explicitly provides for most of the forces now at Basra to go to Afghanistan, where they would be positioned for operations against Iran, or into central Asia.

Generally, the invisible government appears dismayed by its loss of momentum and the constant erosion of the political position of its asset, Bush. 110,000 US factory workers lost their jobs in June, the worst total in a year and a half: autos and textiles are collapsing. The housing bubble may also be nearing its end, with the bankruptcy of Fannie Mae on the near-term agenda. World derivatives have officially reached $300 trillion, with JP Morgan Chase holding the largest single portfolio. The one virtuoso performance of July 7 was that of the Federal Reserve, Bank of England, and European Central Bank, which flooded equity and capital markets with liquidity through such vehicles as the Plunge Protection Team (PPT), turning a big Wall Street loss into a small gain.

During the recent Reopen 9/11 tour of eight European cities, Jimmy Walter repeatedly forecast that the general predicament of the Bush regime and the US financier faction would lead to another large-scale terror attack before the end of 2005; this has now occurred, and there is no end in sight. The tide of US public opinion has now definitively turned against the Iraq war and to some degree against Bush, as all major polls demonstrate. Notable is the 42% affirmative response to the Zogby International question as to whether, if it could be proved that Bush lied to launch the Iraq war, he should be impeached. Larry Franklin of the Wolfowitz-Feith neocon apparatus has been indicted for divulging US secrets, and the American-Israeli Public Affairs Council has been raided twice; further indictments are expected. Karl Rove has now been revealed as the source of the Valerie Plame leak, making Rove and perhaps other White House officials fair game for federal indictment. The Niger yellowcake forgeries and the Chalabi state secrets cases are still pending -- to say nothing of two stolen elections and the 9/11 Septembergate itself. All these factors incline the rogue network to seek an improvement in their situation through a flight forward to a wider war in Iran. Those who stand to lose most by such an Iranian adventure must now mobilize to make Mr. Bush's second term as eventful as Nixon's second term turned out to be in 1974.

Interview Transcripts

Excerpts from transcripts of interviews with Peter Power, ex-Scotland Yard, who now heads private security firm Visor Consultants, which was running terror bombing drills in the London Underground on 7/7 , followed by an interview with John Loftus.

BBC Radio 5, July 7th, 2005

Power: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.

Host: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?

Power: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.
ITV News, London, July 7th

POWER: Today we were running an exercise for a company -- bear in mind now that I'm in the private sector -- and we sat everybody down in the city -- 1000 people involved in the whole organization -- with the crisis team. And the most peculiar thing was, it was we based on a scenario of simultaneous attacks on a underground and mainline station. So we had to suddenly switch an exercise from fictional to real.

INTERVIEWER: Just to get this right, you were actually working today on an exercise that envisioned virtually this scenario?

POWER: Almost precisely. I was up to 2 o'clock this morning, because it's our job, my own company. Visor Consultants, we specialize in helping people to get their crisis management response, how you jump from slow time thinking to quick time doing. And we chose a scenario with their assistance, which is based on a terrorist attack because they're very close to a property occupied by Jewish businessmen there in the city, and there are more American banks in this city than there are in the whole of New York -- a logical thing to do.

"He Was Working for British Intelligence"

Fox News Dayside with Linda Vester, July 29, 2005:

MIKE JERRICK [FOX NEWS]: John Loftus is a terrorism expert and a former prosecutor for the Justice Department. John, good to see you again. So real quickly here, have you heard anything about this Osman Hussain who was just picked up in Rome? You know that name at all?

JOHN LOFTUS: Yeah, all these guys should be going back to an organization called Al-Muhajiroun, which means The Emigrants. It was the recruiting arm of Al-Qaeda in London; they specialized in recruiting kids whose families had emigrated to Britain but who had British passports. And they would use them for terrorist work.

JERRICK: So a couple of them now have Somali connections?

LOFTUS: Yeah, it was not unusual. Somalia, Eritrea, the first group of course were primarily Pakistani. But what they had in common was they were all emigrant groups in Britain, recruited by this Al-Muhajiroun group. They were headed by the, Captain Hook, the imam in London the Finsbury Mosque, without the arm. He was the head of that organization. Now his assistant was a guy named Aswat, Haroon Rashid Aswat.

JERRICK: Aswat, who they picked up.

LOFTUS: Right, Aswat is believed to be the mastermind of all the bombings in London.

JERRICK: On 7/7 and 7/21, this is the guy we think.

LOFTUS: This is the guy, and what's really embarrassing is that the entire British police are out chasing him, and one wing of the British government, MI6 or the British Secret Service, has been hiding him. And this has been a real source of contention between the CIA, the Justice Department, and Britain.

JERRICK: Hold on, John. MI6 has been hiding him. Are you saying that he has been working for them?

LOFTUS: Oh I'm not saying it. This is what the Muslim sheik said in an interview in a British newspaper back in 2001.

JERRICK: So he's a double agent, or was?

LOFTUS: He's a double agent.

JERRICK: So he's working for the Brits to try to give them information about Al-Qaeda, but in reality he's still an Al-Qaeda operative.

LOFTUS: Yeah. The CIA and the Israelis all accused MI6 of letting all these terrorists live in London not because they're getting Al-Qaeda information, but for appeasement. It was one of those you leave us alone, we leave you alone kind of things.

JERRICK: Well we left him alone too long then.

LOFTUS: Absolutely. Now we knew about this guy Aswat. Back in 1999 he came to America. The Justice Department wanted to indict him in Seattle because him and his buddy were trying to set up a terrorist training school in Oregon.

JERRICK: So they indicted his buddy, right? But why didn't they indict him?

LOFTUS: Well it comes out, we've just learned that the headquarters of the US Justice Department ordered the Seattle prosecutors not to touch Aswat.

JERRICK: Hello? Now hold on, why?

LOFTUS: And that's -- Well, apparently Aswat was working for British intelligence. Now Aswat's boss, the one-armed Captain Hook, he gets indicted two years later. So the guy above him and below him get indicted, but not Aswat. Now there's a split of opinion within US intelligence. Some people say that the British intelligence fibbed to us. They told us that Aswat was dead, and that's why the New York group dropped the case. That's not what most of the Justice Department thinks. They think that it was just again covering up for this very publicly affiliated guy with Al-Muhajiroun. He was a British intelligence plant. So all of a sudden he disappears. He's in South Africa. We think he's dead; we don't know he's down there. Last month the South African Secret Service come across the guy. He's alive.

JERRICK: Yeah, now the CIA says, oh he's alive. Our CIA says OK let's arrest him. But the Brits say no again?

LOTFUS: The Brits say no. Now at this point, two weeks ago, the Brits know that the CIA wants to get a hold of Haroon. So what happens? He takes off again, goes right to London. He isn't arrested when he lands, he isn't arrested when he leaves.

JERRICK: Even though he's on a watch list.

LOFTUS: He's on the watch list. The only reason he could get away with that was if he was working for British intelligence. He was a wanted man.

JERRICK: And then takes off the day before the bombings, I understand it --

LOFTUS: Yeah, And goes to Pakistan.

JERRICK: And Pakistan, they jail him.

LOFTUS: The Pakistanis arrest him. They jail him. He's released within 24 hours. Back to Southern Africa, goes to Zimbabwe and is arrested in Zambia. Now the US --

JERRICK: Trying to get across the --

LOFTUS: -- we're trying to get our hands on this guy.

JERRICK: John, hang around. I have so many questions now. [break]

LOFTUS: The US was used by Al-Muhajiroun for training of people to send to Kosovo. What ties all these cells together was, back in the late 1990s, the leaders all worked for British intelligence in Kosovo. Believe it or not, British intelligence actually hired some Al-Qaeda guys to help defend the Muslim rights in Albania and in Kosovo. That's when Al-Muhajiroun got started.

IJAZ: Which is by the way why we know so much about them right now.

LOFTUS: Yes, I'm afraid so. The CIA was funding the operation to defend the Muslims, British intelligence was doing the hiring and recruiting. Now we have a lot of detail on this because Captain Hook, the head of Al-Muhajiroun, his sidekick was Bakri Mohammed, another cleric. And back on October 16, 2001, he gave a detailed interview with al-Sharq al-Aswat, an Arabic newspaper in London, describing the relationship between British intelligence and the operations in Kosovo and Al- Muhajiroun. So that's how we get all these guys connected. It started in Kosovo, Haroon was 31 years old, he came on about 1995.

JERRICK: OK. Here's another question for you.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello, John. With the quid-pro-quo relationship that London obviously had with these terrorists early on, what changed that caused them to all of a sudden get away from the you leave us alone, we'll leave you alone situation?

LOFTUS: The Israelis say that the truce went on for years. Guys from Al-Muhajiroun for example would bring suicide bombers to Israel to blow up Mike's Place. There was a definite link there. And yet the trainer, Sadiki Al Kahn, was able to go back to Britain and not be touched.

The Phony War on Terror: Time to Quarantine the Real Aggressors

Speech to the Axis of Peace Conference or Axe de la Paix, held in Brussels, Belgium, November 17th and 18th, 2005. The conference gathered political and intellectual personalities from more than thirty nations, who are committed against the logic of war, with a view to establishing a permanent structure that will make the voice of peace be heard.

Text of speech to the conference by Webster G. Tarpley:

400 years ago this month, the English King James' first minister Robert Cecil unveiled his masterpiece, the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the king and the parliament. The event was blamed on Guy Fawkes and other plotters, who were tortured and executed. The Catholics, the Pope, the Jesuits and the Spanish were blamed, setting up centuries of conflict and imperial expansion. But the plot was a synthetic provocation staged by Cecil. Terrorism was a birth pang of the Anglo-American financier faction, and terrorism accompanies that faction in its moribund senility today.

According to today's neocon Bush regime in Washington, the central event of world history is the attacks of September 11, 2001. The neocons demand that world affairs be organized around what they call the war on terrorism, supposedly waged by the United States, Great Britain, and the other English-speaking powers against the dark powers of radical Islam. This phony war on terrorism comes complete with preventive nuclear sneak attacks on any country the Bush regime chooses. These can be supplemented by conventional aggression, and by the so-called color revolutions, the new name for the traditional CIA "people power" coups.

The main premise of the war on terror is the myth of September 11 -- 3,000 people allegedly killed by a group of 19 hijackers including Mohammed Atta, all members of al Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden operating from a cave in Afghanistan with a laptop computer, etc. My main point today is that this premise is a big lie, as I argue in my book, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA (Joshua Tree CA: Progressive Press, 2005). The 9/11 events were a deliberate provocation carried out from within the US military, security, and intelligence apparatus by a deeply entrenched faction variously called the invisible government, the secret government, the parallel government, the rogue network, the secret team. This faction cuts across the CIA, the Pentagon, the NSA, the FBI, the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and other key parts of government. It is a faction which has been operating for more than a century. It meshes with the British MI-6 and Defence Ministry.

9/11 was a successful coup d'etat designed to shift the Bush White House into the War of Civilizations mode described by Samuel Huntington. The Arab and Islamic worlds were the first targets, to be followed by China, and also Russia, as per the Wolfowitz doctrine. 9/11 thus joins the tradition of self-inflicted or imaginary attacks going back to the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor in 1898, which launched the Spanish-American War, and with it US Imperialism. The secret government tried to stage a fascist march on Washington against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and tried to assassinate him. They have brought us the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassination, the fake Gulf of Tonkin incident (partly admitted in recent weeks by the NSA), the Vietnam War, the attempted assassination of Reagan, the gun-running and drug-running of the Iran-Contra affair, the bombing of Serbia, the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk, and, their crowning achievement, 9/11, followed by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. US presidents are generally puppets of this rogue network, which responds to the needs of Wall Street and the City of London.

It was the rogue network which sent Bush an ultimatum on 9/11 with the words: "Angel is next." The meaning was: launch the war on civilizations, or be liquidated. Bush speedily complied, turning the US government over to the rogue network.

In the terminology of intelligence work, Bin Laden, Atta, and the rest are patsies. They are double agents, fanatics, dupes, agents provocateurs. They operate under the umbrella of al Qaeda, a group which can only be described as the Arab Legion of CIA and MI-6, a classic counter-gang or pseudo-gang against Arab nationalism. Their ethnic and religious background allows the Arab and Islamic world to be blamed for terrorist acts. They receive support from the CIA, as typified by Bin Laden's famous kidney dialysis. These figures have criminal intent, but what they do not have is the physical and technical ability to produce the effects observed -- just as Lee Harvey Oswald, no matter how evil he was, could not have fired the requisite number of shots at President Kennedy in Dallas.

The terrorist controllers and case officers for Atta and the others were evidently Able Danger, a joint project of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Special Forces Command. Since Able Danger came to light, we have learned that Able Danger destroyed 2.5 terabytes of its own records, equal to about a quarter of the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world. Rumsfeld has forbidden Able Danger officers to testify to Congress.

The patsies could operate freely and openly, without being arrested, because of the network of moles inside the US government. These moles are loyal to the invisible government, not to the constitution and the laws. They make sure the patsies are available to be scapegoated, and they destroy the evidence and organize the cover-up after the fact. The moles are responsible for paralyzing US air defenses for one hour and forty-five minutes on 9/11, in comparison with average intercept times of 15-20 minutes at most both before and after. No outside force could have obtained this result.

The trained professionals, the technocrats of death, are the third group. They do possess the physical-technical ability to crash planes and other flying objects into buildings, and to destroy the World Trade Center with controlled demolition. Some of these professionals operate from inside government bureaucracies, and others from private offices. They seek anonymity, not publicity.

Recent progress in 9/11 research has focused on the role of war games, military exercises, and terror drills in hiding and facilitating the terror actions of 9/11. So far we know of 14 separate exercises on or related to 9/11. Some were used to suppress air defenses by moving fighter planes to northern Canada and Alaska, far from the 9/11 targets. Others paralyzed air defense by inserting false radar blips onto the radar screens of defense personnel, and with commercial and military aircraft which reported themselves as hijacked.

But there is another dimension. A drill staged at the National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly, Virginia that morning was based on the idea of flying commercial airlines into office buildings. There is every reason to believe that the kamikaze aircraft were controlled from here, the US spy satellite headquarters. Amalgam Virgo, another drill associated with 9/11, involved firing a cruise missile against a land target from a rogue freighter in the Gulf of Mexico. This likely prepared what was done to the Pentagon, since it is clear that no commercial airliner ever hit that building.

Most ominous of all was Global Guardian, a 9/11 drill simulating all-out thermonuclear war with bombers, missiles, and submarines. This drill included an attempt at outside penetration of the nuclear command structure by a "bad" outsider with access to a key command and control system. Here was the secret portal through which the rogue network was ready to launch nuclear war on 9/11. On 9/11, Bush called Putin with an ultimatum: the US would seize Afghanistan, plus bases in ex-Soviet central Asia. If Putin had rejected this, the US rogue network had the capability to set off World War III by ordering nuclear escalation.

When state terrorists attack, they often do it under the cover of an announced, seemingly legal drill that closely resembles or mimics the terror operation. This helps camouflage the criminal intent of the coup plotters inside their own bureaucracy. The drill is just a drill, until it goes live. During the Cold War, Hilex 75 and Able Archer 83 were drills that could have led to real confrontation and war.

When President Reagan was shot in 1981, a presidential succession exercise (Nine Lives) was scheduled for the next day, as a cover for operations. The London July 7 bombings of this year were prepared by exercises named Atlantic Blue by the UK, Topoff III by the US, and Triple Play by Canada, which simulated an attack on the London Underground while an international conference was going on in the UK. On July 7 itself, Peter Power's Visor Associates were simulating explosions in the same stations at the same times that bombs exploded, as BBC 5 reported.

Last summer, Cheney instructed the Pentagon to prepare the atomic bombing of Iran, to be carried out in the wake of a new, larger-scale 9/11. It is clear this was to be state sponsored, false flag synthetic terrorism, designed to give a pretext for the attack.

In the US and other NATO states, a citizens' watch for these dangerous rogue drills has been established to meet the threat. In August, Sudden Response 05 was to simulate a 10-kiloton nuclear explosion in Charleston, South Carolina. A mobilization of concerned citizens protested this drill and, we believe, shut it down. Then came a gas dispersion drill in New York City, and Granite Shadow / Power Geyser, involving weapons of mass destruction in Washington DC. These drills were denounced and protested.

Right now, in the month of November, we are in the midst of the densest concentration of drills since 9/11 itself. First there is Vigilant Shield, a radiological dirty bomb going off in the port of Mobile, Alabama. This is to be answered by Global Lightning, an exchange of nuclear missiles between the US and North Korea, with US ABM missile defense engaged. Simultaneously there is Positive Response and Global Storm, the new name for Global Guardian under the regime of first-strike preventive nuclear attack. These involve a confrontation with Russia over the Ukraine.. Any of these drills could be used as a cover to launch real nuclear provocations and nuclear attacks. War planning against Venezuela continues. Worldwide vigilance is needed to prevent the worst.

The Bush regime is now in crisis because of the lost war in Iraq, the criminally negligent response to hurricane Katrina, and the highest gasoline prices in history. Libby has been indicted, and Rove, Feith, Wolfowitz and Ledeen may follow. As in the movie Wag the Dog, Bush or the neocons are tempted to start a war to escape this crisis. During Watergate, when Nixon declared a nuclear red alert in October 1973, British Prime Minister Edward Heath saw blatant political motives. Whenever Nixon asked for the football, the briefcase containing the secret nuclear launch codes, White House officials Kissinger and Haig watched him closely to keep his finger off the nuclear button. In the summer of 1974, Defense Secretary Schlesinger told US commanders to disregard orders for any military attack coming from Nixon unless they had been confirmed by Schlesinger or Kissinger. Today the situation is similar, and the Democratic Party and the NATO states must demand that the unstable Bush and the desperate neocons be placed under special surveillance during their ouster to prevent new adventures of incalculable dimensions.

But as long as Bush can keep his base of 30-35% of the U.S. population, he can wage war in Iraq indefinitely, and possibly widen that war to Syria and Iran. Bush's hold on his base is due largely to the power of the 9/11 myth over certain parts of the American people. Whenever Bush is held accountable for anything, his response is to cite 9/11. His arguments for the war in Iraq are not based on Iraq, but rather on 9/11. There is only one way to erode Bush's hard core base, and that is by attacking the 9/11 myth. Destroy the 9/11 myth, and the September criminals may be called to account. Destroy the 9/11 myth, and Bush will be neutralized. Peace-loving governments and institutions around the world must address this task, with a campaign of denunciation, exposure, and political education on the truth about 9/11 and the nature of terrorism. One vehicle for this would be an Independent International Truth Commission on 9/11, modeled on the Russell-Sartre Tribunal for Vietnam. The convocation of such a truth commission for 9/11 is more urgent than ever, and should be top priority for anti-war forces well before the Congressional elections a year from now.

On October 5, 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt called in Chicago for a quarantine of the fascist dictators, for the isolation and boycott of aggressors. Since then the wheels of history have turned, and it is now the Bush-neocon regime in Washington which must be quarantined by the forces of civilized humanity .There can be no military or security cooperation with the neocons. Free trade pacts with the neocons are suicidal. Bush officials are guilty of international conspiracy to wage aggressive war, a capital crime under the Nuremberg precedents. When the US population is turning against Bush, it is tragic to see Europe and Japan continuing to support him on so many issues. It is time for the world to quarantine the aggressor. In so doing, it will have the support of the American people.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 7:12 am

INTRODUCTION

There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.
-– Senator Daniel K. Inouye during the Iran-contra scandal.


This book would not have been possible without the efforts of the 9/11 truth movement, a true planetary cooperation by citizens of the world, which was called into being by the crimes of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent coverup. I am indebted for many insights to numerous authors of print and internet studies of 9/11; the extent of this indebtedness and the names of the individual researchers are acknowledged in the text and the bibliography. The 9/11 truth movement, its activists, organizers, filmmakers and demonstrators, has had the immense historical merit of opposing those who have sought to incarcerate the intellectual life of the world in a grim new prison house of the human spirit, the monstrous 9/11 myth.

On September 7, 2001 I left Dulles Airport in northern Virginia on an Air France flight en route to Europe. 9/11 itself overtook me in Berlin. Because of the time difference, I learned of the terror attacks in the afternoon. I immediately concluded that the events of that day, because of their scope, complexity, and technical precision, could not have been possible without the massive complicity of a faction of the US political and military command structure. This is what the US taxpayers were paying $40 billion a year for! It was also clear to me that the goal of this operation was a new world war on a vast scale – something along the lines of the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648, which killed about a third of the population of central Europe. In the intentions of its planners, this new conflict was to be a population war, designed to exterminate large parts of the population of the developing sector, including the Arab and Moslem countries, and eventually China. It was the desperate bid of a bankrupt and declining power to re-assert world domination based on blackmail. It was a world-historical turn towards disaster.

On the evening of 9/11, I attended a memorial service at the Berliner Dom, the Berlin cathedral which had been destroyed by allied bombing during World War II, and which had lain in ruins through most of the communist era in East Berlin. I listened and approved as a leading prelate called for a peaceful response to the gigantic atrocity. This was the wisdom of Berlin, a city which had undergone, not one, but scores days of 3,000 dead during the world wars. This was the lesson of the twentieth century which the neocons refuse to learn: the utter futility of war. A day later, I went to the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Gedächtniskirche, the Emperor William II memorial church on the Kurfürstendamm in what had been the western sector. This church had also been reduced to rubble by the allied bombing. The ruined parts had been kept as shell-scarred rubble, and a modern chapel erected next to them during the early 1960s. And here prayer services were being held around the clock in response to the immense tragedy. Here I realized that it was my duty to do everything in my power to establish the truth of 9/11, and to tear down the absurd myth that was already being elaborated as the pretext for new world wars and incalculable human losses.

I issued my first challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy regarding 9/11 on October 26, 2001 at the Indiana Consortium of International Programs, which was held in the beautiful hoosier countryside about fifty miles east of the Wabash at Brown County State Park. Here I invited an audience of academics and scholars to think back to Vietnam as a time when the government, most professors, the media, and the pundits were all tragically wrong about virtually everything – facts in the case, diagnosis of the world situation, strategy, and tactics. We were now living through another such time, I argued. The invasion of Afghanistan, then under way, was as I argued not a military operation, but the systematic bribing of the CIA’s old network of druglords and warlords, backed up with bombing and special forces as enforcers.

I gave an expanded, more detailed, and above all more radical version of this critique on January 20, 2002 at Hanover College, a picturesque Indiana campus set on the bluffs of the Ohio River overlooking the wooded hills on the Kentucky side. This time the audience was larger, some 150 people in a packed lecture hall. Here I was able to build on the pioneering insights of French activist Thierry Meyssan and the Réseau Voltaire website, on former SPD German Technology Minister Andreas von Buelow’s landmark interview to the Berlin Tagespiegel of January 13, 2002, and former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s incisive remark of December 10, 2001 to German N-TV that the activation of Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty on mutual assistance among the alliance members was illegitimate, since “proof had to be delivered that the Sept. 11 terror attacks came from abroad… [and] that proof has still not been provided.” (N-TV, Dec.10) As of September 11, 2004, three years and many failed commissions and investigations later, it has still not been provided. My own understanding of the 9/11 events developed further through my participation, as speaker and listener, in the Lucern, Switzerland, conference of November 1-2, 2003, which was attended by Andreas von Bülow, Gerhard Wisnewski, Peter Dale Scott, Mike Ruppert, Nick Begich, and Thomas Meyer; in Carol Brouillet’s San Francisco International Inquiry-Phase One of March 26- 29, 2004; in the Toronto International Inquiry Phase Two of May 25-31, 2004, organized by Barrie Zwicker, Ian Woods, and Michel Chossudovsky; and in the Manhattan Center conference of September 11, 2004 in New York City, organized by Nico Haupt and Nick Levis with the support of Jimmy Walter. I also derived encouragement and ideas from a manuscript on the collapse of air defense on 9/11 sent to me by my good friend Maurizio Blondet, a courageous Catholic journalist who writes for Avvenire, the Milan daily newspaper of the Italian Catholic Bishops’ Conference.

At the conferences mentioned and others, I have advocated the creation of an Independent International Truth Commission (IITC) on 9/11 in which a panel of distinguished international personalities, including statesmen, artists, philosophers, historians, scientists, and humanitarians would hear evidentiary briefs prepared by the leading experts in the 9/11 truth movement, for the purpose of rendering an authoritative finding on the veracity of the official version. The approximate model for such proceedings would be the Russell-Sartre Tribunal of 1966-67; without wanting to endorse the philosophical views of its two leading personalities, it is clear that this was an effective forum in educating the intellectuals of the world against the Vietnam War, and could have a similar function in the age of the phony “war on terrorism.” I have since benefited from the wise advice of Ralph Schoenman of KPFA in San Francisco, who was the general secretary of the Russell Tribunal. He and I belong to a very exclusive club, that of graduates of Princeton University who have made the critique of the current US oligarchy and ruling class into the central business of their lives. It is my hope that this book will add new momentum to the forces around the world that are converging on the IITC as an indispensable part of the effort for 9/11 truth, and thus for world peace and economic development, in the months and years ahead.

A key feature of this study is its approach to the roots of 9/11. I do not see 9/11 as an event growing exclusively or even primarily out of conditions in Afghanistan or the Middle East. Rather, I see 9/11 as the culmination of a decade-long crisis of economics, finance, politics military affairs, and culture in the United States. In the broadest sense, 9/11 is the wages of a disastrous decade of economic globalization, and of the impoverishment and weakening of an entire society. 9/11 does not grow out of US strength, but represents a desperate flight forward in an attempt to mask US weakness. 9/11 fits within the tradition of NATO geopolitical or spheres of influence terrorism as it was practiced in Italy and West Germany during the years from 1965 to 1993.

I reject the naïve or sociological explanation of terrorism. This approach says that misery, oppression, and desperation give rise to terrorist organizations which spontaneously express these underlying moods. But we live in an era in which political and social reality are incessantly manipulated by huge and pervasive intelligence agencies – CIA, FBI, MI- 6, FSB (KGB), Mossad, BND, SDECE, SISMI and the like – whose cumulative effect is to over-determine or sur-determine observed reality. I therefore contend that the more reliable conceptual model for understanding terrorism is one that situates the secret intelligence agency, or factions thereof, in the center of the process, recruiting prospective terrorists from the immiserated masses and forming them into clandestine organizations which are henceforth subject to guidance from outside, behind, and above. High-profile international terrorism is not spontaneous; it is artificial and synthetic. It requires expert terrorist controllers. Because of this, the starting point for realistic appraisal of 9/11 is not primarily the sociology of the Middle East, but rather the historical record of NATO and CIA state-sponsored terrorism in western Europe and elsewhere in the post-World War II period. For it is here, and surely not in some distant cave of the Hindu Kush, that we can find the methods and personnel which produced 9/11. If the term grotesque originally meant something that came out of a cave, we can justifiably dismiss the official explanation of 9/11 – Bin Laden with his laptop in an Afghan cave – as the grotesque theory of terrorism.

Synthetic terrorism is a strategy used by oligarchs for the purpose of waging war on the people – that is to say, on the middle class in Machiavelli’s sense of popolo. Terrorism must therefore be opposed. My own understanding of these events is informed by having experienced first hand, as analyst, journalist, and author, the Italian and German terrorism of the 1970s and 1980s.

In June 1978, while working as a correspondent in Rome, I was contacted by Giuseppe Zamberletti of the Italian Christian Democratic Party. The kidnap-murder of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro had reached its tragic climax in May 1978, when Moro’s body was found in the trunk of a car in Via Caetani in downtown Rome, three blocks from my office at that time. Zamberletti had been one of the very few Italian political leaders who had suggested a NATO role in the attack on Moro. Two days after Moro was kidnapped, and his bodyguards murdered, Zamberletti attracted the attention of the British press, which wrote that “Signor Zamberletti, an intelligent Christian Democrat who has worked as deputy Interior Minister in charge of the Italian secret services, made a number of interesting comments about NATO. It seems that Zamberletti said that De Gaulle left NATO because of the dozens of assassination attempts against him, and that France, after that, and by implication as a result of that, had succeeded in keeping terrorism under control.” (London Times, March 17, 1978) In another interview, Zamberletti said that an effective defense against terrorism would have to be vigilant in all directions – “360 degrees,” as he put it. (Panorama, July 4, 1978) Here was de Gaulle’s celebrated formula of defense “tous azimuths,” against nominal allies as well as adversaries, west as well as east, US and UK as well as USSR. With this, Zamberletti became the target of the Anglo-American party in Italy.

Zamberletti asked me to prepare a study of how the mass media had treated the Moro case, which had been the dominant news story for two months. I gathered a group of friends and co-workers from the EIR news agency I was working for at the time, and told them of the proposal. Out of a desire to defeat the nightmare of terrorism and provide justice for Moro, most of them -- Italians and a couple of Americans -- volunteered to spend their month-long summer vacation assembling the study that Zamberletti had requested. No money was ever involved. The more we looked, the more we found, and soon our study -- entitled Chi ha ucciso Aldo Moro? (Who Killed Aldo Moro?) had grown far larger than the brief overview Zamberletti seemed to have had in mind. The writing was done during the summer of 1978 in what was then the EIR European headquarters in the Schiersteinerstrasse in Wiesbaden, Germany, not far from Frankfurt airport. The resulting product was released at a press conference in Rome in September 1978. It was extensively if unfavorably reviewed in the newsmagazine Panorama. The main finding was that Moro had been killed by NATO intelligence, using the Red Brigades as tool and camouflage at the same time. The cause of the assassination was Moro’s determination to give Italy a stable government by bringing the Italian Communist Party into the cabinet and the parliamentary majority. This plan was opposed – as a violation of the Yalta spheres of influence, which made Italy a vassal of the US -- by the Henry Kissinger wing of the US foreign policy establishment, as well as by certain factions of the Italian ruling elite, grouped around the reactionary P-2 lodge, which was still secret at that time. Accordingly, my study named Kissinger, NATO, and British intelligence as prime suspects, and not the Warsaw Pact embassies named by the Italian media. Later, Moro’s widow revealed that her husband had been directly threatened by a leading US figure over the issue of expanding the majority to include the PCI. This figure had told Moro that any attempt to bring the PCI into the government would bring terrible consequences for him personally. Some commentators identified this US figure as Kissinger, and here they were on firm ground. With this, the thesis of the study, Chi ha ucciso Aldo Moro, was vindicated. I therefore have a track record as someone who opposes terrorism; I have shown in practice that I understand how terrorism works. This is something which sets this book apart from the babblings of the tribe of “terror experts” who populate cable television and purvey disinformation.

Another thesis of the 1978 study was that those who glorify and lionize terrorism, providing the terrorists with ideological cover, should be investigated as its accomplices. One pro-terror ideologue whom I singled out in this regard was Antonio Negri, Professor of Doctrine of the State at the University of Padua, near Venice. Later, in April 1979, Judge Calogero of Padua issued arrest warrants for Toni Negri, Franco Piperno, and other leaders of the allegedly defunct Potere Operaio group. They were charged with being not just the ideologues and sympathizers, but part of the leadership of the Red Brigades. It was said that Calogero had been influenced by my Moro dossier. Today Negri is still operational from his jail cell, helping to inspire a regroupment of violent anarchist “criminal energy” groups like the Black Bloc, which represent the culture medium from which future terrorists are being recruited by intelligence agencies in Europe. After the publication of Imperial Hubris, this thesis should be applied to the CIA, home of what appears to be the most influential chapter of the Bin Laden fan club.

I have also learned much from three European experts. One is Brigadier General Paul Albert Scherer of Germany, one of the truly great counter-intelligence specialists of recent decades. Scherer, a Social Democrat, was the chief of the Militärischer Abschirmdienst (MAD), the West German military counter-intelligence service, in the early 1970s. Between 1985 and 1994 I had the opportunity of spending many hours with General Scherer, primarily discussing Soviet questions, but also branching out into historical matters and other themes. This book is, after all, an exercise in counter- intelligence. I do not know what he will think of my present conclusions, but I have derived permanent benefit from his insights, and I thank him.

Another who deserves my thanks is the late G. L. Bondarevsky, the distinguished Soviet orientalist and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. A Russian Jew born in Odessa, Bondarevsky became the dean of Soviet and later Russian experts on the five republics of central Asia and beyond into the Middle East; he was the author of the definitive scholarly study on the pre-World War I Berlin to Baghdad railway. At a conference in Germany in the spring of 1991, when the world was still reeling from the shock of the First Gulf War, I briefed Bondarevsky on some preliminary research into George H.W. Bush and his clan. I stammered out an important conclusion in my substandard Russian: “Ego otets zaplatil Gitleru!” – his father, meaning Prescott Bush, paid Hitler, was what I wanted to express. “Vy you don’t tell vorld real story of bastard Bush?” replied Bondarevsky in his unique English. It was thanks to Bondarevsky’s interest and engagement that I was able to overcome the bureaucratic inertia of EIR, still my employer at that time, and obtain the time necessary to write the 1992 George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography together with Anton Chaitkin. Bondarevsky, who at the age of 83 was also one of the world’s leading experts on the petroleum industry, was found dead in his apartment on August 8, 2003, the victim of a mysterious murder, most likely arranged by the Anglo-American oil cartel or their agents. His friends are determined to keep his memory alive, and to secure justice for him some day.

The third recipient of my thanks is the late Professor Taras Vasilievich Muranivsky of the Moscow State University of the Humanities. Professor Muranivsky was the President of the International Ecological Academy of Moscow and later the Schiller Institute of Russia at the time I was the President of the Schiller Institute of the United States, and he made it possible for me to visit the Russian capital in October 1993, just after Yeltsin’s tanks had bombarded the Russian White House. He nominated me as a consultant to the IEA, one of the first intellectual associations to be formed in Russia after the loosening of the police state. Thanks to Muranivsky, I worked in Moscow under the curfew for two weeks, had the opportunity to stand before the White House, looking up at the fire- blackened structure. I saw the daily tragedy of the Soviet middle class in the streets. Russia, it was plain to see, was being destroyed by the Anglo-American finance oligarchs. Who would be next? Muranivsky died on July 17, 2000. During one visit to the United States, Muranivsky had said in a briefing: “The US would like to treat Russia like a banana republic. But it’s a nuclear banana.” This reality of this thermonuclear danger is present in these pages.

The present study embodies a number of criteria which I believe derive directly from the 9/11 events. 9/11 was an example of state-sponsored, false-flag, synthetic terrorism, hereinafter called synthetic terrorism. My thesis is that the 9/11 events were organized and directed by a rogue network of high government and military officials of the United States, with a certain participation by the intelligence agencies of Britain and Israel, and with a more general backup from the intelligence agencies of the other Echelon states (Australia, New Zealand, Canada). This US network represents the current form of the Dulles Brothers-Lemnitzer-Landsdale network of the early 1960s, of the Bay of Pigs- Kennedy assassination-Gulf of Tonkin networks of a slightly later era, and of the invisible government/secret government/parallel government/shadow government that was widely understood to have been the prime mover of the Iran-contra affair. The 9/11 rogue network subsumed some of the asteroids of the 1990s, that is to say, the privatized intelligence enterprises operating under Reagan’s executive order 12333. The September criminals were financiers, top-level bureaucrats, flag-rank military officers, top intelligence officials, and technical specialists; the prime focus of their operations was in all probability a series of private sector locations, where confidentiality could be best assured by excluding elements loyal to the constitution. It is therefore probably misleading to think of people like Cheney as the hand-on field commanders of the terrorist forces of 9/11, although Cheney appears to have been complicit in other ways. Bush was expendable enough to undergo an assassination attempt that morning; he owes his continued tenure in office to his speedy capitulation to the demands of the September criminals. As time has gone on, Bush has undoubtedly learned something more about the invisible government he allowed to take over his administration. By 2004, Bush had to be considered as witting as it was possible for a person of his faculties to be about the basic facts of terrorism.

Because of the wretched performance of the Kean-Hamilton 9/11 commission, many well established facts and timelines pertaining to 9/11 have been blurred and defaced. The 9/11 commission has corrupted and confused public awareness of the basic facts of 9/11 far more than it has enhanced it. It is a rule of thumb for researchers that some of the most revealing information on a cataclysmic event like 9/11 generally becomes available in media reports in the immediate aftermath of the event. This is before the editors and producers have fully assimilated the party line of the oligarchy on what has happened, so they may well publicize facts which are incompatible with the official, mythical version of events. As time goes by, such heuristic revelations become rarer, although they may yet inflict fatal blows on the official story, particularly if the official story is beginning to break up. The 9/11 commission represents the triumph of oligarchical scholasticism, the embalming of what had been a living tragedy into a smoothed-over textbook account from which virtually all of the truth has been drained. This book therefore often gives priority to materials generated soon after 9/11, before the mind-control line of the regime became totally hegemonic.
The reader will understand this book better after a short note on the criteria of selection which have informed it. There already exist encyclopedias and encyclopedic timelines on 9/11 by such writers as Nico Haupt and Paul Thompson, to both of whom I am indebted for much empirical material. My aim has not been to compete with them in exhaustive completeness, but rather to offer a definite hypothesis about what happened on 9/11. This book has therefore been constructed along the following conceptual lines:

1. Mass gullibility about the events of 9/11 is based on unmediated sense certainty re-enforced by merciless and repetitious media bombardment. Receptivity to the 9/11 myth is correlated with a Hollywood-style, sense-impressionist naïve epistemology, complicated by the schizophrenic and autistic elements present in Anglo-American culture. Belief in the 9/11 myth is agreeable to a way of thinking in the tradition of John Locke’s empiricism, which is here formally rejected and repudiated. I do not offer information so much as a method, and the method used here is that of Plato, Machiavelli, and Leibniz. I join Plato in refusing the illusions of the cave in favor of dialectical reason. I assert that understanding 9/11 requires a conceptual framework; my approach is therefore conceptual and empirical, but not empiricist. The framework here is that of patsies, moles, and expert professionals discussed below.

2. This book stresses those aspects of 9/11 which indicate state sponsorship by a rogue network or invisible government operating inside the US government and military. Other aspects are given less consideration or omitted entirely.

3. This book stresses those aspects of the official version which are physically impossible. Many dubious aspects and contradictions of the official story are not treated if they can be construed as a matter of opinion, rather than being susceptible to rigorous physical proof. The same goes for physical evidence, such as pictorial evidence, where individual interpretations of what is seen may diverge. At the same time, I urge researchers interested in these aspects of the problem to continue their efforts so that the catalogue of physical impossibilities can be expanded as it doubtless deserves to be.

4. I have sought to be guided by Machiavellian political realism, rather than by the irrational appeals of propaganda.

I express my gratitude to my old friend Raynald Rouleau of Quebec City for his matchless computer expertise. Finally, this book would have been impossible without the patience and good will of my publisher, John Leonard.

Webster Griffin Tarpley
Washington DC
September 11, 2004
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

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PART 1 OF 3

CHAPTER I: THE MYTH OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, “just to keep the people frightened.”
-- Orwell, 1984, 127.


With the publication of the Report of the Commission to Investigate Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (also known as the Kean-Hamilton Commission after its chairman and vice- chairman), the pattern of coverup and incompetence on the part of the officially constituted investigative agencies of the United States Government is complete. Since September 11, 2001, no part of the United States Government has offered a convincing, coherent, complete explanation of the events of that day, and of other events related to them. Indeed, no US government agency has ever so much as proposed to prove the truth of the official account, even in the way that the Warren Commission attempted to demonstrate the veracity of its version of the Kennedy assassination.

The Kean-Hamilton Commission called no hostile witnesses, no skeptics, no devil’s advocates. It ignored a growing number of book-length studies which have appeared in English, French, German, and other languages around the world. It never invited to its plenum FBI whistle-blowers like Colleen Rowley (who shared Time Magazine’s Person of the Year honors at the end of 2002), nor did it call FBI agent Kenneth Williams, the author of the famous Phoenix memo, to testify in its plenary meetings. The Commission was, by contrast, happy to invite the obsessive anti-Iraq ideologue Laurie Mylroie, a fanatic so notorious that she is dismissed with contempt as “totally discredited” even by Richard Clarke in his book, Against All Enemies. (Clarke 232) As we will show at various points in this study, the Kean-Hamilton Commission represents a cynical and meticulously orchestrated exercise in coverup and obfuscation. The net overall result of the Kean-Hamilton Commission has been to obscure even those few relevant facts which had become well established in the mainstream media prior to its inception.

Before the Kean-Hamilton Commission, the chronology of events regarding the interplay among the Federal Aeronautics Administration (FAA), the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and other government agencies had been fairly well established by the 9/11 truth movement. The deliberately doctored chronologies offered by the Kean-Hamilton staff have turned that clear picture into chaos. Before the Kean- Hamilton operation went to work, there was an important debate about whether phone calls received at the White House on the morning of September 11 had indicated that unauthorized persons were in possession of top-secret US government code words. The Kean-Hamilton Commission has now assured us that this crucial incident in effect never happened. Before Kean-Hamilton, Congressional Committees and the National Institute of Standards and Technology had been forced to grapple in public with the blatant anomalies of three modern steel skyscrapers collapsing on the same day as the result of fire – something that has happened on no other day of world history. For the Kean- Hamilton Commission, this problem simply does not exist – it has disappeared from the official narrative. No account has been taken of critical or skeptical commentaries, even when these have been the centerpieces of books which have reached the top of the best- seller charts in important countries like France, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere, or have been telecast in prime time in these same places. The demands of the bereaved families of 9/11 have been ignored – even though it was because of the persistent lobbying of these families that the Kean-Hamilton Commission ever came into being in the first place. A cruel hoax has been practiced on these families, and those who thought that an attempt to cooperate in good faith with the Kean-Hamilton Commission to guide it toward the truth have received a bitter disappointment. The Kean-Hamilton Commission in short has shown no decent respect for the opinions of mankind, and has submitted no important facts to a candid world.

The Kean-Hamilton Commission has turned out to be nothing more than a colossal exercise in begging the question. Everything that was controversial, everything that was dubious in the eyes of billions around the world has been simply assumed to be true and posited as the starting point for the entire inquiry. As a fallacy this has been around since the medieval schoolmen, who called it petitio principii. In the hands of the Kean- Hamilton Commission, begging the question is meant to work as an arrogant, bureaucratic act of superior power. Believe this, said the Inquisition, or be damned. Believe this, says the Kean-Hamilton Commission, or be vilified as a paranoid obsessed with conspiracies. Thus, when the 9/11 commission was created, it formed nine investigative teams. The first of these was entitled: “Al Qaeda and the Organization of the 9/11 Attack.” That is a clear case of rush to judgment and jumping to conclusions, since such a finding should be the end result of an inquiry, and not its starting point.

For the Kean-Hamilton Commission is not a contribution to scholarly debate. It is just as much a part of the US government’s assault on the world as an F-16 bombing Fallujah. For the Kean- Hamilton Commission is an act of ideological terrorism worthy of Senator Joe McCarthy. Behind it stands the taboo proclaimed by the figurehead of the regime:

We must speak the truth about terror. Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th, malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty. (UN General Assembly, November 10, 2001)


It is a point of view at variance with the best moments in American history, as we intend to show. But no amount of bureaucratic arrogance has been able to paper over the manifold absurdities, the contradictions, the impossibilities, the outrageous flaws that infest the official version of the 9/11 events. The Kean-Hamilton Commission simply has no answer for questions about how the alleged hijackers were identified, how they were able to operate, why WTC Building 7 collapsed, why air defense was non-existent, what hit the Pentagon, what happened over Shanksville, what happened to the insider trading, and many more. For any serious, intelligent person – and there are many – the Kean- Hamilton pastiche can only be rejected.

The failure of the Kean-Hamilton Commission leaves the world with the imbecilic myth: the four airliners were hijacked by nineteen Arabs, from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Kuwait. Their squad leaders were Atta, Shehhi, Hanjour, and Jarrah. Their “mastermind” was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Their rear echelon was Ramzi Binalshib. Their guru was Osama Bin Laden, the terrorist pope who lives in a cave. From his distant grotto in the mountains of Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden, the diabolical genius of the twenty-first century, directed the worldwide network that attacked the United States.

THE SEPTEMBER CRIMINALS ARE STILL AT LARGE

At a deeper level, closer to the heart of the matter, the Kean-Hamilton has failed to indict the real September criminals. It leaves untouched the network of moles in the US government without whose efforts, both in preparation and in coverup, the events of 9/11 could never have happened. It has not identified the clandestine command center which directed the operation. It has taken not one step towards locating the technocrats of death who actually had the physical and technical capability to make these events happen, in contrast to the supermarket-caliber terrorists who are supposed to have caused them. All of these networks remain in place, and remain anxious to avoid detection. The September criminals and their project, the clash of civilizations in the form of a new Thirty Years War, remain at large, their desperation magnified, but their power undiminished. Think of this when you hear the strident clatter of the Bush regime as it warns the public that a new wave of terror attacks, quite possibly using weapons of mass destruction of the atomic, bacteriological and chemical varieties, is inevitable before the November 2004 elections. The government has failed us, and the Kean-Hamilton Commission has failed us, before, during and after 9/11. The September criminals remain in place, with every intention of striking again, then to take cover behind the shield of martial law.

We are opposed to terrorism. We seek to prevent a new wave of terrorism. We want to identify the September criminals and bring them to justice, because no one has laid a glove on them so far. We have no illusions about the psychotic Arab patsies whose antics are being used to cover up what was in reality a coup d’etat made in the USA, a coup d’etat not against Bush but in favor of a specific policy, that of the clash of civilizations. We condemn terrorism because terrorism is the means used by oligarchs to wage secret war against the people. But the terrorism we fight is the real terrorism of the real world, not the idiotic distortions dished up by the regime and the media.

The official 9/11 account has by now taken on all the characteristics of a myth. In the minds of many, credulousness in regard to the myth has taken on the overtones of religious sanctity. It has taken root deeply in the dark places of the American mind. The myth is a sensitive subject, hedged round with powerful reaction formations and fearful taboos. Challenge these and the subject will often respond with irrational anger and indignation. Nevertheless, the fact remains: the official version has never been proved. It is an unproven assertion, and in the end a myth. Attempts to base an entire world order on unproven assertions and lies did not fare well in the twentieth century: the war guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, which assigned exclusive responsibility for the war to Germany and her allies, while completely exonerating the Allies, was intended as a means to extort some 55 billion gold dollars in reparations. But it turned out to be the key to Hitler’s successful demagogy, and generally one of the main causes for fascism, Nazism, and World War II. Let us not build our political house on unproven assertions. Indeed, we should recall that it was the Nazis themselves who avidly embraced myth as the basis for politics: the official chief ideologist of the Nazi movement was Alfred Rosenberg, and his famous work was The Myth of the Twentieth Century. The story of Osama in the distant cave is already the myth of the twenty-first century.

Because of the events of 9/11, the regime proclaims, the world as we knew it has disappeared. We are confronted with a new world of preventive and pre-emptive war, of first use of nuclear weapons, of unilateral aggression, of barbarian racism and hatred, of the glorification of violence and killing, of force and the threat of force. Yet before we go willingly into this monstrous new world, it is our right to demand that the events of 9/11 – precisely because they are said to have caused all this – be more thoroughly examined. Before we accept the neocon death warrant for civilization, culture, and every human value, we demand the right of an appeal to the court of reason.

That project will be undertaken in this book. We will draw on the extensive research completed by the 9/11 truth movement during the time since that catastrophic day. Specific indebtedness and especially meritorious works will be acknowledged in the text, or in the footnotes. Participants in the 9/11 truth movement have almost always been private citizens, more or less isolated, more or less bereft of means, but nevertheless determined to seek the truth. The researchers, writers, scientists, historians, websites, and activists of the 9/11 truth movement have upheld the values of universal intellect – la république des lettres – as these were spurned by the mass media, the US government, and most academics. They have produced what can now be seen as a coherent body of work which is readily accessible to anyone who wants to learn. This field is no more free from aberrant theories, petty squabbles, and crank positions than any other, and not everything can be taken for pure gold, but the difference between this honest research and the corrupt, controlled corporate media and official pronouncements is as day and night. The 9/11 truth movement is a work in progress which has already accomplished much, and which now awaits wider discussion and the further refinement which that greater exposure will undoubtedly bring.

We urge you to grapple with the issues presented in this book. This is important because of the imminent threat of new terrorist attacks, organized in large part by the original September criminals. It is important also because this is a time of aggravated world economic, political, and strategic crisis, wars, depression, and breakdown crisis, as we will have occasion briefly to show as part of our explanation of why the 9/11 attacks happened. We must also be aware of the underlying long waves of American history. As we will outline towards the end of this book, the 2004 election has completed a fateful cycle of that history – the pattern of party re-alignment which has recurred every 36 or so years since the ratification of the federal Constitution, taking place in 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932, and 1968. We are due for a profound shakeup in the party structure and the basic pattern of political life in this country. The reason for sending this book into the world is this: if the 9/11 myth can be dismantled, discredited, and denounced before the masses, there is hope that the party re-alignment may unfold in a progressive direction, perhaps with the collapse of the Republican Party, perhaps with the split of the Democratic Party into factions representing roughly the views of Senator Lieberman and those of Senator Kennedy. Under these conditions, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can be terminated, and new aggressions warded off. The neocons can be brought to justice. International monetary reform, world reconstruction and economic development, vast projects of infrastructure can be addressed. But if the 9/11 myth is allowed to stand intact as the basis for US national life, the current regime, and the Republican and Democratic Parties, then there is every reason to fear that the likely party re-alignment will represent the transition to fascism in some form whose outlines we can already see.

The dominant oligarchies of the United States and several other countries committed a serious error when they decided to accept the crude conspiracy theory peddled by the Bush regime concerning 9/11. This was a matter where a careful and judicious ruling class would have exercised more restraint, and kept more options open. The wholesale endorsement of the official 9/11 myth by the controlled corporate news media, by the two major political parties, and by large parts of academia has created a situation in which the 9/11 myth is now the indispensable basis of large sectors of American life. Many institutions have in effect wedded their entire credibility to the myth. This was very unwise. We cannot be entirely certain that the truth about 9/11 will ever become generally accepted by the masses, but if such revelations should ever occur, they will now destroy far more than the 9/11 myth. The dismantling of the myth in favor of an account at least closer to reality will have the most profound institutional implications. The Republican Party, because it has presided over the institutionalization and exploitation of the myth, would tend toward extinction. The contradictions inside the Democratic Party would explode. Many careers would go by the boards. Because the entire society is so heavily invested in the myth, the entire social order would be called into question. Even the prevalent property relations, at least in regard to media, defense industries, oil and some other sectors, would inevitably be called into question. The current status of the 9/11 myth as the substratum of so many hegemonic institutions helps to explain the absolute hysteria of the ruling elite whenever substantive critiques of the myth arise, as they must ever tend to do.

Everything depends on intellectual activists like you. The 9/11 myth is the last line of defense of a bankrupt regime. Was the Iraq war based on lies? Do the atrocities of Abu Ghraib violate the laws of war and the Geneva Convention? Is the middle class being crushed? The regime, with its back to the wall, has only one answer, “9/11.” The mantra of 9/11 is the carte blanche for black propaganda, war crimes, a police state, and thievery until the end of time, if we listen to those now in power. And there is an irony: if the regime itself has been able to cite the need for wartime solidarity in regard to Afghanistan, the Democratic Party has had only the litany of 9/11 to fall back on. The Democratic Party has portrayed itself as the true believers in the 9/11 myth, eyes fixed on the quest to find Bin Laden, while the Republicans were going astray in Mesopotamia. Senator Kerry, until he can be convinced to think otherwise, is more married to the 9/11 myth than Bush is. The Democrats are Johnny one note, while Bush has the means to modulate. Result: 9/11 is the lever used by all factions of the oligarchy to keep the masses in submission. This lever we will break before their faces.

WHAT DO YOU KNOW AND HOW DO YOU KNOW IT?

Many readers are by now spluttering with indignation. We can hear them expostulating: “The official version of 9/11 is a myth and a lie!” – followed by a string of obscenities worthy of Dick Cheney. But think for a minute: if you think you know all about 9/11, how do you know what you think you know?

The first identification of Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda as the perpetrators came during the day on September 11, as various commentators and announcers for cable, broadcast, and public television began floating the charge that Bin Laden and al Qaeda were behind the attacks. Apparently CNN was the first to mention Bin Laden, and the other myth- mongers immediately followed its lead. In retrospect, we know that many of these leaks came from two important functionaries in the Washington bureaucracy. These were George Tenet, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who should have been fired that same day, but who was allowed to resign in disgrace in June 2004, on the eve of the publication of a Senate Intelligence Committee report which pilloried him and his agency for gross incompetence. This was the same Tenet who later assured Bush that the case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a pretext for a US invasion was a “slam dunk.” The other prime myth-monger was Richard A. Clarke, the former terror czar of the Clinton administration who had been kept on by Bush. Clarke had a long history, of which many of his gulled victims at those hearings were unaware. He had been dropped from the State Department by James Baker III because he was accused of concealing Israeli exports of US military technology to the People’s Republic of China which were banned under US law, and which the Israelis had agreed in advance not to carry out. In some quarters, Richard Clarke’s name was mentioned at the time of the hunt for MEGA, the Israeli mole thought to be operating in the White House. Clarke is a close friend of Israeli defense officials, among them David Ivry of the Israeli Defense Ministry.

As Clarke recounts in his recently published memoir: “At the outset of the first Gulf War, Ivry and I conspired to get our governments to agree to deploy a US Army Patriot unit in Israel. No foreign troops had ever been stationed before in Israel. We also worked together to sell Patriots to Israel, and to tie in the Kiriat [the Israeli Pentagon] with American satellites that detected Iraqi Scud missile launches towards Israel. After the war, the CIA circulated unfounded rumors that Israel had sold some of the Patriots to China. Many in the State Department who thought I was ‘too close to Israel’ sought to blame me.” (Clarke 46) Clarke was a protégé of Arnold L. Raphael (killed in the same plane crash with Gen. Zia of Pakistan), and worked closely with Morton Abramowitz.

On the morning of Sept. 11, as the White House was being evacuated for fear that it could be hit after the strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the first top official to say “This is Al Qaeda!” had been Richard Clarke. (New York Times, December 30, 2001). When Clarke arrived at the White House a little after 9 AM on 9/11, he found Cheney and Condoleezza Rice alone in Cheney’s office. “What do you think,” asked the horrified Cheney. Clarke’s immediate reply: “It’s an al Qaeda attack and they like simultaneous attacks. This may not be over.” (Clarke 2) This is the moment of conception of the 9/11 myth. At this moment Clarke, as a New Yorker would say, didn’t know from nothing. Had he ever heard of strategic deception? Had he ever heard of diversionary tactics? Had he ever heard of feints?

Clarke tells us in his memoir that he attempted to collect his thoughts about the events going on around him as he walked from the White House Secure Videoconferencing Center just off the Situation Room across the White House to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, which was Cheney’s underground bunker:

In the quiet of the walk, I caught my breath for the first time that day: This was the “Big al Qaeda Attack” we had warned was coming and it was bigger than almost anything we had imagined, short of a nuclear weapon. (Clarke 17)


This is already one of the most fateful snap judgments in world history. Had Clarke utterly forgotten the lessons of Oklahoma City, when leakers had inspired the report that the explosion was the work of Moslems? Clarke had no proof then, and has come forward with none since.

Rushing to overtake Clarke as the leading hipshot in snap strategic diagnosis was CIA Director Tenet. While Bush was cowering in his spider hole at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, he conducted a National Security Council meeting by means of teleconference screens. “Who do you think did this to us?” Bush asked Tenet. Tenet was emphatic: “Sir, I believe it’s al Qaeda. We’re doing the assessment, but it looks like, it feels like, it smells like Al Qaeda.” (Bamford 2004 91) In other words, Tenet also had no proof, no evidence, no case – just his crude Lockean sense certainty.

Later, after World Trade Center 7 had gone through its inexplicable and embarrassing collapse at about 5:20 PM, Clarke addressed a high-level interagency meeting from the Situation Room. Present by video link were Armitage of State, General Meyers of the JCS, and other important officials. Clarke stated: “Okay, we all know this was al Qaeda. FBI and CIA will develop the case and see if I’m right. We want the truth but, in the meantime, let’s go with the assumption it’s al Qaeda. What’s next?” (Clarke 23) Before he went to bed in the White House, Bush jotted a note to himself: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today. We think it’s Osama Bin Laden.” (Bamford 2004 92)

Given the fecklessness of Bush, Cheney, and Rice, Richard Clarke was running the US government on 9/11, and it was he who made the myth of the exclusive responsibility of al Qaeda/Bin Laden into the official policy of the US. Clarke can thus claim pride of place as the originator of the 9/11 myth. And Clarke was more than a mythograph. Clarke also shared in the responsibility for the bungling and stupid attack on an aspirin factory in Khartoum, Sudan, after the bombing of US embassies in east Africa in the summer of 1998. If there were an Oscar for deception, Clarke’s performance at the Kean-Hamilton Commission hearings in April 2004 would have won it. It was that virtuoso performance which launched Clarke on his current career as a television commentator predicting imminent WMD terrorist attacks on this country and advocating the speedy imposition of martial law. We will hear more about this gentleman later. All we need to note right now is that anyone would be foolish to buy a used car from Clarke or Tenet.

Another early official fingering of Osama Bin Laden as the guilty party came from Secretary of State Colin Powell on September 13. At this point Powell was competing for attention with the fulminations and Schrecklichkeit of neocons like Wolfowitz, who was ranting that the US would “end states harboring terrorism,” and would do so unilaterally, without reference to the collective security of the United Nations. Already voices of caution were being raised about another ill-prepared rush to judgment. Professor Paul Rogers, of Bradford University's peace department, warned against assuming Middle East extremists were behind the tragedy. “We've been here before. With Oklahoma, everybody assumed it was Middle East [terrorists], then it turned out to be home-grown Timothy McVeigh,” he said. “Again with the pipe bomb in Atlanta, it turned out to be domestic.” (Guardian, September 11, 2001) In any event, this was the same Colin Powell, who in February 2003, before the United Nations Security Council, perjured himself on the question of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. This was the same Colin Powell who alleged mobile biological weapons labs, chemical weapons dispensers, and tubes being used for centrifuges in the process of uranium enrichment. This was the same Colin Powell who committed the most spectacular perjury in the history of the United Nations Security Council.

On September 14, the FBI, which had known nothing about anything before the attacks, published its infamous list of nineteen hijackers. As we will soon see, the mortality rate among those supposed kamikazes was less than 100%, with no less than seven of the suspects named turning up alive and well in the days after this list was published. More importantly, this was a list prepared by the same FBI which had been responsible for the Waco massacre of men, women, and children in 1992, the agency that illegally withheld documents in the capital murder trial of Timothy McVeigh, an abuse which ought to have caused his conviction to be thrown out, but which only caused it to be delayed. This is the agency whose vaunted Crime Lab turned out to be a sewer of incompetence and corruption. This is the same FBI which clumsily attempted to entrap and frame up the innocent Richard Jewel during the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games, while the real culprit went free. This is the same FBI which persecuted the Chinese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee without any grounds, accusing him of having transferred secrets to the People’s Republic of China. This is the same FBI which permitted the Soviet mole Robert Hanssen to operate inside it for fifteen years. This is the agency which ostracized John O’Neill, and which ignored the Phoenix memorandum and Colleen Rowley’s warnings from Minneapolis. This is the same FBI which could not capture the Unabomber over decades, until his own brother turned him in. This is the same agency which, over the previous months, in the words of Governor Kean of the 9/11 Commission, “failed and failed and failed and failed and failed.” Are we then to believe that on September 14 this troubled and incompetent agency enjoyed a brief interlude of success, as represented by the list of the 19? And if they did succeed that day, they must have soon lapsed back into incompetence again, as seen in their utter failure to prevent the October 2001 anthrax attacks, or ever to identify the perpetrator, perhaps because the anthrax in question was weapons grade material which had come from a US military lab, probably Fort Detrick, Maryland. This was the same FBI whose main activity after 9/11 seemed to consist in confiscating relevant evidence and tampering with witnesses, telling them that had not seen what they knew they had. Anyone familiar with the record will have a very hard time taking seriously such allegations coming from the discredited, dysfunctional FBI.

Nelson-Rees returned from his week in Miami like the local boy come home from battle. Reporters were still pursuing him. Friends showered him with congratulatory phone calls and letters. And the laboratory's resident bard immortalized his accomplishments in a limerick that appeared on one of the office bulletin boards:

A perceptive young Nelson named Rees,
Dumbfounded genetic police
When HeLa he found
To abound all around,
In cell lines from West and from East.


In addition to all the excitement it generated, the publication of their report brought great relief to Nelson-Rees, Flandermeyer, and the rest of the crew. It had been frustrating to know what they knew without having a means of broadcasting it. Now that the news was out, it might be easier to spread the word about future screwups.

Yes, spreading the word, that was the goal here. The publicity was fun, of course. It was nice for an "outhouse project" to steal the show for a moment. But getting the news out to those who needed to hear it -- the scientific community -- that was the main point of all this. And the publication of their paper was really just the beginning.

Frantic scientists had been calling and writing from all over the United States and several other countries to request copies of the article. In a few weeks Nelson-Rees's secretary had mailed out all 400 reprints and had to order another batch from Science. The author himself was in equally high demand. Would he give a lecture at the Stanford School of Medicine? Could he address a meeting of viral cancer researchers in Hershey, Pennsylvania? Would he brief a group at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois?

***

Nelson-Rees hit the road, preaching and proselytizing like biology's Billy Graham. At one stop he would tell the stories of such victims as Bassin and Plata who, through lack of vigilance, fell prey to HeLa's sabotage. At another he would describe the waste and futility of trying to learn about breast or prostrate or kidney cells by studying cultures of cervical cancer. And he would always conclude with the exhortation: Never trade cells without reliable information about what they are and where they've been. And always double-check them, before and after your experiment.

In some respects Nelson-Rees's early evangelizing looked like a touring revival of Gartler's performance at the Bedford Springs Hotel. Like Gartler, Nelson-Rees was telling audiences they had torpedoed years of their own work by being sloppy and letting HeLa creep in on them. He encountered the same reactions, shock and skepticism. And he too was offering new tools, chromosome banding along with other techniques, to help set things straight.

But Nelson-Rees soon added a new message that was less scientific in tone and more philosophical, or perhaps more political. It was at a 1975 meeting of cell culturists and cancer researchers in Lake Placid, New York, that he began to talk about two different reasons for cell mixups. One was simple sloppiness. "It can be combatted in individual laboratories by adherence to increasingly stricter techniques," he explained. The other effect was "more lasting and insidious." It had to do with researchers' attitudes, "frailties of the human ego ... exigencies of profit margins ... the threat of cuts of support in contractual arrangements."

Most members of the audience had gone into his talk thinking they had a pretty good idea what Nelson-Rees was going to say. But when he hit this stuff about scientists' attitudes and frailties of the human ego, they didn't know quite what to make of it.

It was curious, he told his fellow researchers, how well they handled a problem involving bacteria, for example, or viruses. Most of them quickly faced up to it when a cell culture became spoiled by such infectious agents. Not so with cell mix-ups. They seemed to take it personally when someone claimed their cultures had been overtaken by other human cells, he said.

"Cases of cellular contamination have been known to precipitate lengthy diatribes and are the reason for lectures such as this one," he clucked. "This kind of contamination would certainly be easy to control if one could frankly and readily discuss it and eradicate it without fear of offending colleagues' feelings."

At the moment, said Nelson-Rees, there was no friendly forum for discussing cell mix-ups and no means of rapidly notifying the scientific community of contaminated cultures. The audience raised a few eyebrows in disapproval as he said, "I would now like to describe to you how difficult it was for us to publish our results on those cultures which we have vouched are HeLa derivatives."

He began with the story of the Russian cells. He recounted how reluctant institute officials had been to believe his results, how for months they merely ignored the rapidly accumulating data. He read aloud the reviewer's critique that accused him of making a "gratuitous attack" on the Russians, and he named a few names. Then he moved on to the American cells: HBT3, HBT39B, HEK, and the others. He explained that Science had originally turned down the now celebrated report, quoting sarcastically from Abelson's rejection letter: "The manuscript and the referees' comments are enclosed. I trust the comments will be helpful to you when you prepare the paper for submission elsewhere."

Stan Gartler had certainly never done this. He had presented his findings, disturbing as they were, made a couple of suggestions, and taken his leave. But here was Nelson-Rees hauling out the dirty laundry. He was pointing out the stains and explaining how they had got there, and more than a few members of the audience were starting to squirm.

To say that a few cell lines had got shuffled around, that was one thing. But to suggest that scientists were letting their egos get in the way of good science or that they avoided publishing important information because it might be controversial ... well, it just wasn't done.

-- A Conspiracy of Cells: One Woman's Immortal Legacy and the Medical Scandal It Caused, by Michael Gold


BUSH AS INVETERATE LIAR

The definitive identification of Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda as the authors of the atrocity came only on September 20, in Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress. Bush stated:

The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al Qaeda. They are the murderers indicted for bombing American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and responsible for the bombing of the USS Cole. […] This group and its leader – a person named Osama Bin Laden – are linked to many other organizations in different countries, including the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. There are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 countries. They are recruited from their own nations and neighborhoods and brought to camps in places like Afghanistan, where they are trained in the tactics of terror. They are sent back to their homes or sent to hide in countries around the world to plot evil and destruction. The leadership of al Qaeda has great influence in Afghanistan and supports the Taliban regime in controlling most of that country. In Afghanistan, we see al Qaeda’s vision for the world. […] And tonight, the United States of America makes the following demands on the Taliban: deliver to the United States authorities all the leaders of al Qaeda who hide in your land. […] These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion. The Taliban must act, and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share their fate. […] Our war on terror beings with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated. (Bush 10-11)


Here we can see how inextricably the naming of Bin Laden and al Qaeda is bound up with the unilateral preventive war doctrine, the attack on Afghanistan, and the aggression against Iraq. But let us put these remarks into contact. Some months later, delivering his January 2003 State of the Union address from the same podium in the well of the House of Representatives, this same Bush intoned:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. (January 28, 2003)


These infamous sixteen words added up to one Big Lie in Dr. Goebbel’s sense, as has been amply demonstrated. In the same speech this same Bush claimed:

We’ve also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical and biological weapons across broad areas. We’re concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States. (January 28, 2003)


No such vehicles ever existed. This same Bush also alleged:

From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents and can be moved from place to place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them. (January 28, 2003)


Mobile labs of the type described by Bush have never been found in Iraq. Experts have speculated that these wildly exaggerated reports were based on vans used for public health purposes, or perhaps on ice cream trucks. On another occasion the very same Bush asserted:

The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has had numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his “nuclear mujahedeen,” his nuclear holy warriors. (October 7, 2002)


But the renewed nuclear program turned out to be a chimera, most likely invented by the neocon darling, convicted bank embezzler, and betrayer of American state secrets, Achmed Chalabi, to justify his $400,000 monthly stipend provided by the American taxpayer. This was the same Bush who had conjured up the specter of an Iraqi nuclear attack on the United States:

Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. (Cincinnati, Ohio, October 2, 2002)


The internet teems with web sites dedicated primarily to keeping up with Bush’s legendary, picaresque mendacity. Bush has lied about the cost of his prescription drug boondoggle, about nonexistent economic reports he claimed had buttressed his economic prognostications, about all spheres of policy. He has lied about funding first responders, grants for port security, payments to children’s hospitals, and veterans’ benefits. The tenant of the White House has a troubled relation to the very concept of truth.

This is the man who has acquired an unparalleled at home and abroad reputation as a liar – at least, in those quarters, like the Office of Canadian Prime Minister Chretien, where he was dismissed as a moron. This is an administration in which blatant lying has become part of the daily routine – in part because of neocon guru Leo Strauss’s theory that truth is dangerous for the masses, and rulers therefore have to be esoteric, that is, lie through their teeth. But whether Bush is a cretin or a liar, his statements offer no sufficient basis for falling in with the neocons in their march towards endless war against the entire world. Knowing what we knew as of late 2004, no person of good judgment could ever accept statements from the current regime at face value. Nevertheless, otherwise intelligent people who would not dream believing Bush about Iraq or other issues are content to swallow his biggest whopper of them all: his 9/11 story. This doublethink must end. The Bush regime is a castle of lies and fabrications, and the keystone of all of them is the 9/11 myth.

It is now proverbial in Washington to remark that there is no proof linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and this is certainly true. But, by the very same token, there is also no proof in the public domain anywhere that adds up to a case against Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda. We should point out that we hold no brief for the misfit sheikh and his sociopathic followers. Bin Laden was a creation of the CIA, and his al Qaeda followers, to the extent that they exist at all, are doubtless individuals characterized by a surfeit of criminal intent. But we must not join the anonymous CIA agent author of the recent book Imperial Hubris in portraying the inept and unstable Bin Laden as a genius. Taken by themselves, Bin Laden and his band represent supermarket-caliber terrorists, capable of bombing a shopping center, or of destroying a bus. Any capabilities above and beyond this can only be explained through assistance provided by intelligence agencies, primarily but not limited to the American ones. There is no doubt that Bin Laden and his benighted gaggle would have desired to inflict destruction on the scale of 9/11. What is at issue is their physical and technical capability of doing so on their own in the universe as we otherwise know it to be constituted. From this point of view, Bin Laden and company emerge perhaps as actors in the plot, but playing the parts of patsies, dupes, fall-guys, or useful idiots. The main point remains that Tenet, Clarke, Powell, the FBI, and Bush have produced no convincing evidence to establish the 19 Moslem men, al Qaeda, and Bin Laden as the authors of the crimes.

Another Bush administration mythograph has been Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense. But Rumsfeld as well has a troubled relation to truth. In a press conference, he was asked if he planned to lie in order to protect state secrets. Rumsfeld boasted that he was clever enough to keep secrets in other ways, but that his underlings might have to preserve secrecy any way they could:

Rumsfeld: Of course, this conjures up Winston Churchill’s famous phrase when he said – don’t quote me on this, okay? I don’t want to be quoted on this, so don’t quote me. He said sometimes the truth is so precious that it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies…. That is a piece of history, and I bring it up just for the sake of background. I don’t recall that I’ve ever lied to the press, I don’t intend to, and it seems to me that there will not be reason for it. There are dozens of ways to avoid having to put yourself in a position where you’re lying. And I don’t do it.

Reporter: That goes for everybody in the Department of Defense?

Rumsfeld: You’ve got to be kidding. (Laughter.) (September 25, 2001)


Theodore Olson, together with his wife Barbara Olson, had been the host of a salon which served in 1998-1999 as a meeting place for one of the principal cliques supporting the Clinton impeachment. This group included the late Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Federal Appellate Judge Robert Silberman, failed Supreme Court candidate Robert Bork, and other militant reactionaries. Olson had on one occasion lectured the US Supreme Court that “it is easy to imagine an infinite number of situations…where government officials might quite legitimately have reasons to give false information out.” (Yahoo News, March 22, 2001) Mrs. Olson was later counted among the victims of 9/11; we will return to her story.

In neocon philosophy, the art of lying has been raised to a fine art. Let us take the case of William Kristol, a leading Washington Straussian, and founder of the Project for a New American Century, a congeries of warmongers. Kristol told Nina J. Easton, the author of a profile of some top neocon leaders of the 1990s, Gang of Five (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) that “One of the main teachings [of Strauss] is that all politics are limited and none of them is really based on the truth. So there's a certain philosophic disposition where you have some distance from these political fights....You don't take yourself or your causes as seriously as you would if you thought this was 100% ‘truth.’ Political movements are always full of partisans fighting for their opinion. But that's very different from 'the truth.'” With the help of money from Rupert Murdoch, Kristol has cultivated the art of the Goebbels Big Lie since 1995 in his weekly magazine, the Weekly Standard, the neocon house organ.

But, discredited as Tenet, Clarke, Powell, the FBI, Rumsfeld, Kristol, and Bush may appear, perhaps other proof has been offered since? No.

In the days right after the attacks, Colin Powell promised the world a white paper or white book to set forth the contentions of the United States government about what had happened, with supporting evidence. Powell did this on NBC’s Meet the Press, where the following exchange occurred on September 23, 2001:

Question: Are you absolutely convinced that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for this attack?

Secretary Powell: I am absolutely convinced that the al Qaeda network, which he heads, was responsible for this attack. […]

Question: Will you release publicly a white paper, which links him and his organization to this attack, to put people at ease? Secretary Powell: We are hard at work bringing all the information together, intelligence information, law enforcement information. And I think, in the near future, we will be able to put out a paper, a document, that will describe quite clearly the evidence we have linking him to the attack. And also, remember, he has been linked to previous attacks against US interests and he was already indicated for earlier attacks against the United States. ( http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/5012.htm )


The following day, September 24, saw a front page article in the New York Times which bragged that Powell’s evidence “reaches from the southern tip of Manhattan to the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan.” However, there was clearly something wrong with the US case, since, in an appearance with Bush at the White House rose garden on September 24, Powell somewhat obliquely retracted his promise. And on that same afternoon, Bush’s spokesman Ari Fleischer, a past master of mendacity, said that Powell had been the victim of a misunderstanding. No white paper would be forthcoming, he suggested. According to Fleischer, much of the information of Bin Laden was classified, and making it public would compromise US intelligence methods and sources. Even the press trollops in the White House briefing room rebelled at this attempted sleight of hand. A reporter challenged Ari, asking if there was in fact “any plan to present public evidence so that the average citizen, not just Americans, but people all over the world can understand the case against Bin Laden.” Fleischer disappeared in a cloud of verbiage: “In a democracy it’s always important to provide the maximum amount of information possible. But I think the American people also understand that there are going to be times when that information cannot immediately be forthcoming.” As of this writing, it still has not been forthcoming.

Bush himself rejected any white paper. He said that any such publication may “make the war more difficult to win.” (AP, September 24, 2001) Amidst much embarrassment, the Bush regime quickly fell back on the following ploy: they would assemble a watertight case against Bin Laden, but this was so sensitive that could only be shown to governments. We must always bear in mind that these assertions were not presented in the manner of a scholarly debate, but as part of brutal pressure on sovereign states to yield to Bush’s manichean Diktat.

Even though Bush did not have enough information on the 9/11 events to put out a credible white paper, he nevertheless ordered the FBI to curtail their investigation of the case. The FBI order to stop probing described the investigation done so far as “the most exhaustive in its history.” A government official said in an understatement that “The investigative staff has to be made to understand that we’re not trying to solve a crime now.”

BANKRUPT LEFTISTS

Not just the impotence, but the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of many US leftists was pitilessly displayed by the events of 9/11. Many who would never dream of believing Bush or the FBI on matters far less important were willing to swallow the entire official story this time around. Noam Chomsky went so far as to issue a lengthy interview in the wake of 9/11; he even had it published as a small book. This passage is at the heart of the matter:

Q: NATO is keeping quiet until they find out whether the attack was internal or external. How do you interpret this?

Chomsky: I do not think that is the reason for NATO’s hesitation. There is no serious doubt that the attack was ‘external.’ […]

Q: Could you say something about connivance and the role of America secret service?

Chomsky: I don’t quite understand the question. This attack was surely an enormous shock and surprise to the intelligence services of the West, including those of the United States.” (Chomsky 17)


This leaves our poor Chomsky far to the right of the 9/11 euroskeptics – and that means foreign ministers, defense ministers, and generals -- in the NATO ministerial council! Michael Parenti’s book on the terrorism trap falls into it, at least as far as the 9/11 official story is concerned. Amy Goodman of the Democracy Now radio program banned all criticism of the official 9/11 story, while proclaiming her own superlative courage in tackling issues like East Timor. When she finally let the dignified academic David Ray Griffin come on her show, she insisted on balancing him with the slimy character assassin Chip Berlet, who knew nothing in particular about 9/11.

The left wing of the Democratic Party, grouped around The Nation magazine, was rudderless. Some time after 9/11 this magazine produced an anthology of its most important post-9/11 articles. A key contributor to this collection was Jonathan Schell, who wrote in his introduction: “It was clear from the start that Islamic fundamentalists were responsible, almost certainly in the service of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization, but the magnitude of the force involved remained hazy in the extreme.” (Vanden Heuvel xv) Other articles in the collection, some by very distinguished and well-meaning authors, may have more or less merit, but they do not rise above this inadequate level. The US left might object all it liked to the consequences which Bush derived from his fabricated 9/11 premise, but unless those leftists were willing to attack the premise, it was clear that their efforts would not be effective. Even in the pages of The Nation, it was the neocon bully Christopher Hitchens, billed until only yesterday as the “last Marxist,” who seemed to carry the day, based on the refusal of all the others to challenge the myth he shamelessly used to club them into submission.

Some governments found ways to leak their estimate of Bush’s alleged proof. One was the government of Pakistan, which had been placed under a US war ultimatum to cooperate in an attack on Afghanistan. Here the distinguished retired military leader General Mirza Aslam Beg told an interviewer some months after the fact that the “evidence” provided to Pakistan's Musharraf government “would not hold in a court of law, because of the inherent weaknesses.” (EIR, December 10, 2001) In a newspaper interview, Gen. Beg insisted that the attacks had been the work of highly-trained experts “who used high technology for destruction. He argued that even ordinary trained pilots could not have carried out the missions observed. (Nawa- Waqt, September 13, 2001) [1]

Egyptian strategic analyst Tal’at Muslim argued in al-Akhbar of Cairo that the resources available to Arab and Islamic terror organizations were “well below” what was plainly necessary to carry out operations on the scale of 9/11. (September 13, 2001) In the Palestinian paper al-Quds, Hatim Abu Sha’ban found that the US authorities were searching for the perpetrators in entirely the wrong places. “They accused…the least likely to be perpetrators in light of the operation’s nature, which requires great planning capabilities, knowledge of information, and mobility on the part of the criminals who committed this terrorist operation.” (September 18, 2001)

The Saudi government complained that its citizens were being accused of crimes, but that the US had provided no hard evidence. Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef said that he viewed Osama Bin Laden more “as a tool,” than the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. “He's at the top of the pyramid from the media point of view, but from my personal views and conviction, I don't think he's at the top of the pyramid,” commented Prince Nayef. U.S. officials were claiming that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. But Nayef noted that “until now, we have no evidence that assures us they are related to September 11. We have not received anything in this regard from the United States.” (New York Times, December 10, 2001)

Some indication of the problems being encountered by the US bureaucracy in trying to pin 9/11 on Bin Laden were reflected in a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Faint Trail: It's Surprisingly Tough To Pin Terror Attacks on the ‘Prime Suspect.’” Here the paucity of evidence was the dominant note. Such evidence as did exist was largely circumstantial, the Journal noted, such as ties of suspected hijacker Mohammed Atta to Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which allegedly was part of bin Laden's Al Qaeda; the presence of one hijacker in Malaysia in January 2000, meeting with someone linked to the bombing of the USS Cole, which was in turn allegedly linked to bin Laden; communications intercepts showing Al Qaeda operatives had some advanced knowledge of the strikes; or that two of the suspected hijackers were perhaps linked to a suspected bin Laden operative in Boston. The Journal conceded that the issue of proof was a key component of the U.S.'s ability to enlist support of Islamic countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and perhaps Syria. “The issue of proof is no small matter,” one Administration official was cited as observing. But the US case was plainly a lame one, with an unidentified intelligence official concluding weakly that “no information has come up that suggests that bin Laden wasn't involved.” None of this could even begin to explain how these ragtag forces could mount such a spectacular action. Here was surely no justification for abandoning the entire edifice of international law, which had been formed in large part as a result of wars in which tens of millions of people had perished.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 7:20 am

PART 2 OF 3 (CH. 1 CONT'D.)

BLAIR’S 9/11 DOSSIER: THE CLIFF’S NOTES VERSION

With the US regime struggling, into the breach rushed Tony Blair, a glib and slippery apologist for war. On October 2, Blair’s office in Number 10 Downing Street released the first of his celebrated dossiers. It was entitled “Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States.” Unfortunately, Blair’s dossier was obliged to begin on an uncertain note: “This document does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Osama Bin Laden in a court of law.” Why not, given what is at stake? Answer: “Intelligence often cannot be used evidentially, due both to the strict rules of admissibility and to the need to protect the safety of sources. But on the basis of all the information available HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] is confident of its conclusions as expressed in this document.” Of course, this means that since the proof may be insufficient, we are expected to believe Blair & Co. on the basis of their general integrity and credibility. This is a controversial point, to which we will soon return.

Blair’s main finding:

The clear conclusions reached by the government are: Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the terrorist network which he heads, planned and carried out the atrocities on 11 September 2001; Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda retain the will and the resources to carry out further atrocities; The United Kingdom, and United Kingdom nationals are potential targets; and Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were able to commit these atrocities because of their close alliance with the Taliban regime, which allowed them to operate with impunity in pursuing their terrorist activity.” (Blair at http://www.counterpunch.org/dossier1.html, 1)


Blair’s dossier then went on for 16 of its 19 pages reciting the nefarious deeds of which Bin Laden had been accused: Bin Laden has worked with the Taliban, attacked the USS Cole, and bombed the US embassies in East Africa. He had doubtless issued bloodthirsty calls for murder against the US and its citizens. As for his claims of responsibility, they could simply be the ravings of a megalomaniac. But none of this adds up to 9/11 or anything approaching it. If working in favor of the Taliban were a crime, it would have been necessary to indict Henry Kissinger, who lobbied Congress in favor of Unocal’s pipeline project there. And throughout the argument, Blair relied on unnamed intelligence sources for most of his material.

When Blair finally got to 9/11, he proceeded through a chain of unproven assertions, as signaled by a shift into the vagueness of the passive voice: “Nineteen men have been identified as the hijackers from the passenger lists of the four planes hijacked on September 11. At least three of them have already been positively identified as associates of al-Qaeda.” (Blair 21) But all this means is that the FBI is accusing them, which is wholly inadequate.

From intelligence sources, the following facts have been established subsequent to 11 September; for intelligence reasons, the names of associates, though known, are not given. In the run-up to 11 September, bin Laden was mounting a concerted propaganda campaign amongst like- minded groups of people – including videos and documentation – justifying attacks on Jewish and American targets; and claiming that those who died in the course of them were carrying out God’s work. We have learned, subsequent to 11 September, that Bin Laden himself asserted shortly before 11 September that he was preparing a major attack on America. In August and early September close associates of Bin Laden were warned to return to Afghanistan from other parts of the world by 10 September. Immediately prior to 11 September some known associates of Bin Laden were naming the date for action as on or around 11 September. Since 11 September we have learned that one of Bin Laden’s closest and most senior associates was responsible for the detailed planning of the attacks. There is evidence of a very specific nature relating to Bin Laden and his associates that is too sensitive to release. (Blair 22-23, emphasis added)


All we have here is an exercise in check kiting. The CIA had forwarded a bouncing check to MI-6, and MI-6 had sent it back to Washington by simply citing the claims of the CIA as fact, and covering the whole in a mantle of the Official Secrets Act. It is perfectly plausible that Bin Laden and his associates were planning a terror attack on the US which seemed large to them. The issue, once again, is their physical and technical ability to bring about destruction in the places and on the scale observed. Blair’s document brought the central issue to a head when he asserted:

The modus operandi of 11 September was entirely consistent with previous attacks….The attacks of 11 September are entirely consistent with the scale and sophistication which went in to the attacks on the East African Embassies and the USS Cole. (Blair 23)


The problem is that the 9/11 attacks were incomparably larger and more serious than anything attempted by al Qaeda previously – they were in fact several orders of magnitude larger. This is apart from the question, which we will address later, of the degree to which al Qaeda has continued to receive technical assistance from certain rogue elements of US intelligence and others. So Tony Blair’s dossier turned out to be a string of unsubstantiated assertions, and thus a miserable excuse for proof.

In addition, later events taught us more about Tony Blair’s methods in compiling dossiers.

NUMBER 10 DOWNING STREET – KITCHEN OF LIES

New light on the putative value of intelligence dossiers issued by Tony Blair’s office in Number 10 Downing Street was not long in coming. In September 2002, Blair published amid great fanfare his dossier purporting to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq currently possessed weapons of mass destruction. This was entitled “Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation,” and it was clearly crafted to provide a pretext for waging unprovoked and aggressive war against Iraq. This dossier was exposed as a fraud in two distinct waves of demystification. The first exposure took place in February 2003, when it emerged that entire sections of this report, which had been billed as the most up-to-date evaluation that could be offered by the very formidable capabilities of MI-6 and the rest of the British intelligence machine, had simply been lifted, plagiarized without attribution, from older documents in the public domain. The Iraq dossier had been concocted by Blair and his media guru Alistair Campbell, a figure who combined the worst of image-mongers like Michael Deaver and Karl Rove, using materials provided by British intelligence. Parts of Blair’s dossier had been stolen from articles written by Sean Boyne of Jane’s Intelligence Review, who was horrified by the nefarious use to which his work had been put. “I don’t like to think that anything I wrote has been used as an argument for war. I am concerned because I am against the war,” complained Boyne. Another source from which Blair had lifted material verbatim was a thesis entitled “Iraq’s Security and Intelligence Network,” published in September 2002 by a graduate student, Ibrahim al-Marashi, a California resident. Al-Marashi was equally indignant, commenting that “this is wholesale deception. How can the British public trust the government if it is up to this sort of tricks? People will treat any other information they publish now with a lot of skepticism from now on.” And not just from now on; it is our contention here that this disbelief in regard to Tony Blair’s work product should also be applied retrospectively.

The British Parliament was appalled by Blair’s mendacity, which was so crude that the coded titles of the Microsoft Word documents that made up the dossier had been allowed to remain visible on the Number 10 Downing Street web site. Many pointed to Alistair Hamilton as the dervish of spin behind the entire sordid operation. Former Labour Party Defense Minister and current Member of Parliament Peter Kilfoyle observed that Blair’s deception merely “adds to the general impression that what we have been treated to is a farrago of half-truths. I am shocked that on such thin evidence that we should be trying to convince the British people that this war is worth fighting. Labour MP Glenda Jackson added “It is another example of how the Government is attempting to mislead the country and Parliament. And of course to mislead is a Parliamentary euphemism for lying.” (Daily Mirror, February 8, 2003)

Blair’s nonchalance in cribbing together dossiers on subjects of vast importance also attracted the barbs of British wits. AheadOfNews.com spoofed Blair’s plagiarized Iraq dossier by writing that “a spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged recently that the report, ‘Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation,’ had been cobbled together from a variety of sources, including old term papers, Readers Digest, and several tabloids. John Miller, Undersecretary for Cutting- and-Pasting, explained that ‘plagiarized’ sections of the report included spelling errors, such as ‘weapons of mass distraction,’ and ‘Untied States’ found in the originals. “Our deceptions might have succeeded,’ he said, ‘except for our bloody incompetent proofreaders.” (February 12, 2003) Blair’s Iraq dossier was an international laughingstock, but that had not prevented Colin Powell from praising it in his infamous speech to the United Nations Security Council.

But Blair’s dossier was in the end no laughing matter: it contributed to the deaths of perhaps 15,000 people in Iraq within a year. It also brought tragedy to one of the British intelligence officials who had collaborated in its creation.

In June, 2003, when the Iraq war had already begun to go badly for the aggressors, BBC News broadcast a story by correspondent Barnaby Mason reporting that Blair and Campbell had personally supervised the concoction of the Iraq WMD dossier, sending proposed drafts back to the Joint Intelligence Committee “six to eight times” to be “sexed up” through the addition of more lurid and sensational details. One of these details was thought to be Blair’s fantastic claim that Iraq had WMD which could be launched within 45 minutes. Blair delivered this warning in such a way as to suggest that Iraq would be capable of striking the UK within 45 minutes, despite the fact that Iraq possessed no delivery systems capable of doling this.

The response of the Blair regime to this report was to promote a witch-hunt to ferret out the source inside the government who had leaked such embarrassing material to Barnaby Mason. Officials of the British Defense Ministry allowed journalists to read them lists of persons suspected of being the leaker, and were willing to confirm the identity of their prime suspect as soon as the journalists mentioned his name. In this way, the Defense Ministry in effect betrayed one of its own employees, Dr. David Kelly. A few days later Kelly was found dead in a forest near his home, with his wrists slashed. His death was quickly ruled a suicide. After Kelly’s death, a UN diplomat recalled that he had asked Kelly back in February 2003 what would happen if Tony Blair went through with his plan to join Bush in attacking Iraq. “I will probably be found dead in the woods,” was Kelly’s prophetic reply.

Blair’s fabrications have been covered up with the help of two devious Lords, Lord Hutton and Lord Butler, both of whom have absolved the Prime Minister and his cohorts of deliberately fabricating intelligence. But the London press has dismissed these two reports as “Whitewash” and “Whitewash II” respectively. Each of them is a politically motivated coverup designed to save the interests of the British oligarchy, which has heavily invested in Blair, the 9/11 myth, and the Iraq war. The probative value of these whitewashes is nil.

In the light of all these facts, anyone interested in truth as distinct from propaganda can hardly accept at face value dossiers issued by the man whom his countrymen have now dubbed “Tony Bliar.” Such skepticism must apply not only to Blair’s Iraq dossier, but also to his earlier Bin Laden dossier, which was an important building block in the Bin Laden myth.

TORRICELLI: AN IMMEDIATE BOARD OF INQUIRY

In contrast to the relentless stonewalling of the Bush administration on any serious investigation of 9/11, Democratic New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli soon came forward as the most consistent spokesman for a real probe, accompanied by accountability for the nonfeasance or malfeasance of federal officials. Torricelli represented New Jersey, the state where the largest number of victims of 9/11 had lived, and he appeared to take seriously the need for finding out what happened. Torricelli’s fate therefore becomes a case study of the workings of the US regime in the wake of 9/11. On September 26, Torricelli made an address to the Senate in which he began by talking about how much New Jersey had suffered:

There is not a small town or a city in northern New Jersey that has not been touched or changed. At the time the final body has been found and the search has concluded, 2,000 to 3,000 people in New Jersey may have lost their lives. It is estimated there are 1,500 orphans in my State. It struck everywhere.


He then turned to the US intelligence community, which had manifestly failed its citizens in the most grievous way. He talked about the disproportion between the means allocated and the results obtained:

It is reported in the media that the United States, in what would otherwise be a classified figure, may spend $30 billion per year on intelligence services, including the CIA and the NSA. The Washington Post reports the FBI counterterrorism spending grew to $423 million this year, a figure which in the last 8 years has grown by 300 percent. It is not enough to ask for more. It is necessary to assess what went wrong. Did leadership fail? Were the plans inadequate? Did we have the wrong people, or were they on the wrong mission?


This was a challenge to the CIA, FBI, and the other spy agencies. Torricelli then began to enumerate several concrete examples of incompetence by these same agencies:

Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that over the past 2 years the Central Intelligence Agency had provided to the FBI the names of 100 suspected associates of Osama bin Laden who were either in or on their way to the United States. Yet the Washington Post concludes that the FBI “was ill equipped and unprepared” to deal with this information.

Some of the allegations reported in the media are stunning and deeply troubling, not simply about what happened but revealing about our inability to deal with the current crisis. Previous terrorist investigations, it is alleged, produced boxes of evidentiary material written in Arabic that remained unanalyzed for lack of translators. During the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial, agents discovered that photos and drawings outlining the plot had been in their possession for 3 years, but they had not been analyzed.

Since 1996, the FBI had evidence that international terrorists were learning to fly passenger jets at U.S. flight schools, but that does not seem to have obviously raised sufficient concern, and there was no apparent action.

In August, the FBI received notice from French intelligence that one man who had paid cash to use flight simulators in Minnesota was a “radical Islamic extremist” with ties to Afghani terrorist training camps. Regrettably, this intelligence information was apparently not seen in the greater context of an actual threat that has now been realized. […]


Torricelli then raised his key demand, which was for the immediate convocation of a Board of Inquiry on 9/11, modeled on the boards of inquiry which had been convened after the explosion of the USS Maine, the Pearl Harbor attack, and the losses of the space shuttle Challenger:

On behalf of the people of my State, if I need to return to this Chamber every day of every week of every month, this Senate is going to vote for some board of inquiry. I joined my colleagues after the Challenger accident, recognizing that that loss of life, the failure of technology and leadership, indicated something was wrong in NASA. The board of inquiry reformed NASA and the technology and gave it new leadership, and it served the Nation well.

After Pearl Harbor, we recognized something was wrong militarily. We had a board of inquiry. We found those responsible, we held them accountable, and we instituted the changes.


Torricelli stressed the necessary moment of accountability for the high government officials who had been found wanting:

Indeed, that formula has served this Nation for years in numerous crises. Now I call for it again. First, review the circumstances surrounding this tragedy, the people responsible, the resources that were available, where there was a failure of action, and make recommendations and assign responsibility. Second, develop recommendations or changes of law or resources or personnel so it does not happen again. I cannot imagine we will do less. I call upon us to do more. I will not be satisfied with new assignments of powers or appropriating more money. I want to know what went wrong, and why, and who.


On October 4, Torricelli took the floor again, to repeat his demand for an immediate Board of Inquiry, and to motivate it further:

A number of my colleagues are joining with me in the coming days in introducing legislation to create a board of inquiry regarding the terrorist attacks of September 11. It is my intention to offer it as an amendment to legislation that is currently working its way through the Senate dealing with this tragedy. […]

I cannot predict any of these answers, but what is important is neither can anyone else in this Congress or the administration because without some analysis, as we have done throughout our country's history, we will never know. Indeed, if we fail to have a board of inquiry in the midst of this crisis about these circumstances, I believe history will instruct us it will be the first time in the history of the Republic that the Government did not hold itself accountable and subject to analysis when our American people have faced a crisis of this magnitude.

The people deserve an answer. The Government should hold itself accountable, and only a board of inquiry, independent of the Congress and the Executive, has the credibility to do it.


Torricelli’s proposals had an undeniable power. If a board of inquiry had been possible in desperate days at the beginning of World War II, with a real shooting war being fought against real and formidable enemies, why was it not possible now? Pro-Bush spokesmen were forced into such contortions as arguing that the current situation was infinitely more dangerous than any moment of World War II, or of the Cold War. For those who remembered the Cuban missile crisis, when 100,000,000 million Americans might have died in the first hour of a nuclear exchange, these notions were patently absurd.

Alarmed by the threat of a rapid and credible investigation being raise by the agitation of Torricelli and a small group of like-minded senators, Bush took the highly unusual step of asking House and Senate leaders to allow only two congressional committees to investigate the government's response to the events of September 11, officials said. Bush wanted the inquiry to be limited to the House and Senate intelligence committees, whose proceedings are generally secret. Senate Democratic leaders wanted a broader investigation, involving some committees that would be free to air their findings. But even the Democrats had already narrowed the focus to intelligence failures preceding the terrorist attacks. In ruling out any serious probes, Bush attempted to wrap himself in the banner of military necessity in the prosecution of his alleged war on terror; a senior administration official said “the president thinks it's important for Congress to review events in a way that does not unduly burden the defense and intelligence communities as they are still charged with fighting a war.” Bush made this request of Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D- .D.) during a breakfast meeting with congressional leaders. Daschle told reporters that Cheney had “expressed the concern that a review of what happened on September 11 would take resources and personnel away from the effort in the war on terrorism.” Daschle said he agreed with the demand by Bush and Cheney to “to limit the scope and the overall review of what happened.” In other words, the supposed opposition was agreeing that there was no need to prove the US government’s official version of events. What were they hiding? (“Bush Seeks To Restrict Hill 9/11 Probes, Intelligence Panels' Secrecy Is Favored,” Washington Post, January 30, 2002) The milquetoast Daschle was a poor substitute for a real opposition leader. His capitulation on the board of inquiry issue set the tone for a series of Democratic Party surrenders that lasted for the duration of 2002, and which included abdicating to Bush the constitutional monopoly of the Congress on the power to declare war.

And what happened to Torricelli? He was owed much by his party. As head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, he was often given credit for the 2000 election victories that brought Senate Democrats from 45 seats to 50. Soon after that, he became the target of corruption charges regarding his campaign finances and gifts he had allegedly accepted. For years, he had been profiled as a severe critic of the intelligence agencies. In January 2002, Torricelli supporters hailed U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White's decision not to pursue prosecution of Torricelli for accepting illegal gifts as a vindication. But even on that occasion, The New York Times kept up the pressure for Torricelli to be skewered, arguing in an editorial that “the allegations against Mr. Torricelli are serious and cry out for prompt investigation and resolution in a manner worthy of public respect. If the [Senate Ethics] committee will not provide it, it might as well disband.” Torricelli’s seat was up in 2002, and he was headed for almost certain re-election when the Senate Ethics Committee found he had damaged the reputation of that august body by accepting expensive personal gifts from a campaign contributor. At this point, Torricelli dropped to even with his opponent. Then, a federal judge ordered federal prosecutors to release to the press a letter which some thought suggested that Torricelli might have been guilty of more than talking gifts. A furious press campaign against the senator ensued. At this point, in September, Torricelli’s position in the polls collapsed, and he dropped out of contention. The Democratic Party replaced him with former Senator Frank Lautenberg, who won the seat. Most significantly, federal prosecutors have never to this day brought any charges against Torricelli based on the contents of the supposedly incriminating letter, or any other charges. Their interference in Torricelli’s re-election campaign thus appears to have been a political dirty trick at the outer limits of legality, designed to drive him out of political life. A reason for this operation is evident: they were defending the establishment’s omertà, its code of silence, on 9/11.

The initial congressional effort at dealing with the events of 9/11 was the pitiful coverup offered by the Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security of the House Intelligence Committee. Most of the subcommittee’s work remained cloaked under a veil of secrecy, but a short executive summary containing analysis and a few anodyne recommendations were made available to the public. This simulacrum of a real probe was directed by Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, an opportunistic scoundrel who, at the same time he was superintending this superficial report, was conducting one of the most shameful senate campaigns in US history. Chambliss was seeking to unseat Georgia Democrat Max Cleland, a future member of the Kean-Hamilton Commission. Cleland was a war veteran who had left both his legs and one arm on the battlefield – triple amputee. Chambliss, like Cheney and so many other hypocritical Bush backers, had had other priorities during the Vietnam era. But this did not prevent Chambliss from running as a warmonger, while vilifying Cleland, the war hero, as unpatriotic because he refused to support Bush’s Iraq adventure. And it had worked: Chambliss was elected to the Senate a few months after the report was published. This may have represented the oligarchy’s reward to Chambliss for his yeoman service in piloting the first Congressional coverup of 9/11.

Chambliss billed his handiwork as “a very critical report,” but it was nothing of the kind. Starting from a wholly uncritical acceptance of the 9/11 myth as its premises, the report merely attempted to identify shortcomings in US intelligence and to offer helpful hints about how they might be remedied. Although the subcommittee chronicled the well- known failures of FBI, CIA, NSA and others, no disciplinary action against any sitting federal bureaucrat was recommended. According to Rep. Jane Harman, Democrat of California and the ranking member, the report was “designed to give good people better tools, more resources, access to good watch lists, digital technologies, enhanced platforms, better language training, and career support.” The subcommittee was of the opinion that the 9/11 attacks could not have been prevented, even if all the intelligence in the possession of the entire US government had been synthesized and brought to bear – an absurd thesis. However, by virtue of so much ineptitude, the tradition of begging the question had been further solidified. (CNSNEWS.com, July 17, 2002)

The healthy skepticism displayed by world public opinion in response to the fantastic and unsubstantiated stories peddled by the dubious US regime rankled with Paul Wolfowitz, the chief neocon and the number two in the Rumsfeld Pentagon. When a new Bin Laden tape appeared in which Bin Laden was understood by some as claiming responsibility for the attacks, Wolfowitz expressed the wish that this new tape would put an end to “conspiracy theories.” According to Wolfowitz, the new find “confirms everything we've known about him already. There's nothing new or surprising in it. It's just further confirmation and hopefully, maybe, we'll stop hearing anything more about these insane conspiracy theories that somehow that the US has made this up or that somebody else did it.” (Sam Donaldson, ABC, December 9, 2001)

The US Congress mounted an inquiry, which was conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, acting as the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. The history of this committee, known as the JICI, was a troubled one. Three months into the probe, the original staff director suddenly resigned. This was L. Britt Snider, the former inspector general of the CIA. He was known for being a creature of Tenet, and was considered too eager to spare his former colleagues any embarrassment. But on the other hand, Snider had been favored by Democrat Bob Graham of Florida, who wanted to run for president, and was opposed by Republican senators. Snider was replaced temporarily by Rick Cinquegrana, another CIA officer, and then permanently by Eleanor Hill. “Members are trying to say, ‘We've got to get to the bottom of what happened’ while also saying, ‘We don't want to make it into a witch hunt,’” said L. Paul Bremer, who led a previous probe of intelligence agencies after the bombing of U.S. embassies in East Africa. Bremer later became notorious as Bush’s proconsul in Mesopotamia. Those impulses, Bremer said, “will be an inherent tension irrespective of who is the staff director.” When this JICI’s report was published in December 2002, the most notable thing about it was that 28 pages were absolutely blank – redacted at the insistence of the administration. Remarks by Graham and others fueled speculation that the 28 blank pages contained information that somehow implicated Saudi Arabia, and the press made much of this. But the general approach of the JICI was that there had been an intelligence failure, and that there ought to be measures to avoid more intelligence failures – nothing more.

SKEPTICAL GOVERNMENTS

The other factor that ought to give any thoughtful citizen cause to reflect is the significant number of dissenting opinions registered in the months after 9/11. We have assembled some of these here for inspection. Naturally, few if any of these critical strictures on 9/11 were ever presented in the US news media. That was unconscionable, since many of those who manifested serious doubts on the main issues of 9/11 were eminently respectable, experienced persons with decades of background in government, politics, academia, and military affairs. There were prime ministers and ministers, generals, professors, and well-established experts. Even in the midst of the shock and trauma experienced by world public opinion in the wake of 9/11, they were able to formulate coherent objections to the official version, objections which in many cases have been ignored and not answered down to the present day.

The European NATO partners were confronted with the need to evaluate the US version of 9/11 in a very direct way: immediately after 9/11, the Bush regime demanded the activation of Article Five of the North Atlantic Pact, calling upon member states to assist the United States in warding off an attack from abroad. The US, however, had never offered any proof that the 9/11 attacks had indeed come from outside of its own borders. Under the shock of the 9/11 events, and fearing the retribution of a crazed regime that was announcing its determination to “end states,” the European allies approved the resolution unanimously, even though no proof had been provided. One who objected to this procedure was Helmut Schmidt, the former Chancellor and Defense Minister of Germany for the Social Democratic Party, Several months after the vote, Schmidt reiterated that the European acquiescence had been a mistake. “For that article to be put into action, proof had to be delivered that the Sept. 11 terror attacks came from abroad. That proof has still not been provided,” Schmidt. (N-TV, December 10, 2001; EIR, December 13, 2001)

Another skeptic was former Italian President, Prime Minister, and Interior Minister Francesco Cossiga, who had been in charge of Italy’s internal security during the 1978 kidnap-murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Cossiga indicated his suspicion that the attacks presupposed some form of complicity within the US security system. The mastermind of the attack, Cossiga observed must have been a “sophisticated mind, provided with ample means not only to recruit fanatic kamikazes, but also highly specialized personnel. I add one thing: it could not be accomplished without infiltrations in the radar and flight security personnel.” As for Bin Laden, Cossiga added that “it is not thinkable that he did everything by himself.” (La Stampa, September 14, 2001; EIR September 15, 2001)

General Heinz Karst was one of the founders of the reconstituted German military forces, or Bundeswehr, in the mid-1950s. Like other experienced military men, Karst found the 9/11 story purveyed by the Bush administration suspiciously incomplete. In an interview, he noted that “British secret service coordinator, Pauline Neville-Jones considers--as most experts do--a Bin Laden co-authorship likely. But as far as the logistical operation is concerned, she is almost sure that the attacks were planned out in America, over the last six months.” Karst put these comments in historical context: “When, in 1995, the Federal building in Oklahoma was blown up and 168 human beings were killed, people first thought of Islamic terrorists. But they were Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, two elite soldiers of the Green Berets. The Americans have a long tradition of assassination attacks and of terrorism. Their most famous President, Abraham Lincoln, was shot dead in the theater. Martin Luther King was shot dead. John F. Kennedy was shot dead. His assassin was shot dead. Bob Kennedy was shot dead. Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt. There are rumors that also American ex-military have their hands in many cases.” (Deutschlandmagazin, December 17, 2001; EIR)

Also in Germany, former Technology Minister and deputy Defense Minister Andreas von Bülow developed a broad critique of the official 9/11 story, to which we will have occasion to refer several times. In early January 2002 von Bülow told the Berlin Tagespiegel that “planning the attacks was a masterwork, in technical and organizational terms. To hijack four big airliners within a few minutes and fly them into targets within a single hour and to do so on complicated flight routes! That is unthinkable, without backing from the secret apparatus of state and industry.” He called attention to the fact that covering up the real authorship of a terrorist crime with false tracks for investigators to follow has “been an accompanying feature of covert operations ever since they have been launched by influential agencies.” Von Bülow’s conclusion was that the full truth about September 11 had yet to be told. (Berlin Tagespiegel, January 13, 2002; EIR)

Another critical view of the 9/11 story came from Dr. Johannes B. Koeppl, a former official in the German Defense Ministry, and an advisor to the former NATO General Secretary, Manfred Woerner. Koeppl told Mike Ruppert: “The interests behind the Bush administration, such as the CFR, the Trilateral Commission – founded by Brzezinski for David Rockefeller – and the Bilderberger group, have prepared for and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within the next five years. They are not fighting against terrorists. They are fighting against citizens.” (From the Wilderness, November 6, 2001)

A well-informed European source interviewed by EIR News Service on September 24, 2001 was of the opinion that 9/11 had been organized by a highly sophisticated operation inside the US. He added that “the Russians are aware of this, and that what is behind the operation, is a “vast geostrategic arrangement,” that touches upon the most sensitive Russian interests. The lack of proof of a foreign role, he thought, “makes all this talk of invoking Article 5 so problematic, because Article 5 is not valid, if the attack emanates from inside a NATO country. But the United States is hugely reluctant, to discuss the internal American factors in this. Yet, the fact is, everything that happened on 9/11, was organized, executed, and raised inside the United States. All this obsession on Osama bin Laden is pure nonsense. In fact, this was all well-organized, the people who did it were geniuses, I wish they were on our side.” He elaborated that, “as far as the Russians are concerned, there are two elements involved in all this: There is the United States as such, and there is the situation in Central Asia. All this talk of Islamic terrorism, is a cover for the fact that there are vast geostrategic rearrangements afoot, in all this.” Asked about how 9/11 came about, this source replied: “This was not primarily Islamic at all. I'm sure there were Islamic elements, but what is behind this, is a deeply embedded conspiratorial and organized operation, that took two-plus years to put together. These were people, who were able to make sophisticated moves on the markets, right before it happened. It was very carefully initiated and carried out, using American dissident groups, of which there are a lot, some quite violent. Probably the militia elements would have been tapped, although you have to keep in mind, they are a cover for something else. In any case, what I can say to you with certainty, this was not done by a handful of Islamic fanatics.”

General Mirza Aslam Beg of Pakistan voiced the doubts of his own government, even as Pakistan was being employed as a staging area for the US invasion of Afghanistan. Beg commented that “Many of us in this region believe that Osama or his al-Qaeda were not responsible for 11 September attacks in New York and Washington, yet the coalition led by United States is busy on ‘Afghan bashing,’ chasing objectives, which go much beyond Osama bin Laden. The information which is now coming up, goes to prove that involvement by the ‘rogue elements’ of the U.S. military and intelligence organization is getting more obvious. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda definitely do not have the know- how and the capability to launch such operations involving such high precision coordination, based on information and expertise.” (EIR, December 10, 2001)

Leading British academics also found the US official version unpalatable. Fred Halliday, London School of Economics Professor of International Relations and a well-known expert on the Middle East, told the BBC on September 11 that he would look for a domestic origin within the US of the September 11 events, along the lines of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. He had underlined that it would be a mistake to depend on Bin Laden/Islamist track, since, in the Middle East, bin Laden has often been derided as an American agent. (London Observer, November 25, 2001)

The Arab world in general was not buying Washington’s account, especially in the absence of concrete evidence. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the leading conservative daily in Germany, lamented towards the end of November that the Arab public preferred its own “conspiracy theories” to the assurances offered by the Bush administration. The Arabs, complained the FAZ, tend to believe that “American intelligence circles planned and executed the Sept. 11 attacks in order to launch a long- prepared general assault against the Arab and Muslim world.” As an example, the FAZ cited the November 3 lead editorial in the semi-official Egyptian newspaper paper Al Ahram, whose author, Dr. Mustafa Mahmud wrote: “History has not ended. Slowly the truth is emerging. American groups planned and executed the attacks of Sept. 11. The anthrax cases in the United States are a further indication for this. We don't know what else will come up in the coming days.... History has not ended yet. There are murderers around, who have not been punished, criminals who have not paid the price for their deeds.” (FAZ, November 23, 2001; EIR)

MOSLEM VOICES CONDEMN 9/11, DENY OFFICIAL STORY

In a talk show broadcast on the government’s official nation-wide first program of Egyptian television featuring the leading intellectual Professor Mohammed Selim on November 24, all the participants agreed that organizing the 9/11 attacks was simply beyond the ability of Osama bin Laden and company. “No one in Egypt believes that Osama bin Laden did it,” the professor noted. The London-based Al-Sharq Al-Awsat is generally viewed as the semi-official organ of the Saudi government and the Saudi royal family, and has the largest circulation in the kingdom. This paper carried a commentary by the former Minister of Culture, Farouk Al-Berbir, which attempted to refute the US official account. According to Berbir, “the war on terrorism is an umbrella for the clash of civilizations. Saudi officials suspect that American terrorists were behind the September 11 attacks.” Berbir elaborated that “probably, the statements made by some Saudi officials, who say that they suspect that terrorists from inside the United States itself have been involved in this sophisticated operation, is enough to prove the meaninglessness of accusing bin Laden,...who was financed and armed by the CIA to fight the war against the Soviets.” According to Berbir, the “war against Islamic terrorism” is simply a new cloak for the old familiar American “arrogance of power” and for the powerful Zionist faction in the US administration. In Berbir’s view, the “U.S. has failed to prove or present a single tangible proof for” its official 9/11 story. (Al-Sharq Al- Awsat, November 30, 2001) The Saudi press also accused the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, of complicity in the attacks. Columnist Abd al-Jabbar Adwan wrapped up this paper’s view when he pointed to the numerous Armageddon and Apocalypse cults now operating on the American scene, writing: “Perhaps everyone will be surprised to find that, once again, the operation was ‘Made in the USA,’ as American society is filled with religious groups who consider themselves to be enemies of the state, its mechanisms and its liberal society. (Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, September 13, 2001)

Iran’s Siyasat-e Ruz carried a front-page editorial entitled “A Blow From Within,” in which it argued that since the attacks must have been carried out according to “a complicated methodical, technical and intelligence plan, [this] must have been done by a group or organization that has precise intelligence, access to America’s vital and sensitive center, access to high quality weapons and explosives and infiltrators in those organs.” In this paper’s view, the prime suspects were “dissident elements in the American community, especially the American military, who played the main role in the explosions at the Oklahoma federal center.” (September 13, 2001)

Ferdinando Imposimato, one of the most prominent investigating judges in Italy during the years of the Red Brigades, the Moro assassination, and the attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II, also found it impossible to accept the Bush administration account.

Imposimato was also a former senator and television personality. Speaking to students at Rome University on November 8, 2001 concerning the question of the clash of civilizations, Imposimato made clear that his own view of 9/11 centered on “the participation of internal US forces” in the attacks.

Policy elites in western Europe tended towards skepticism, thus prefiguring the clash of many of them with the Bush administration over Iraq and other issues. An influential and well-informed British observer noted that he had “been convinced, that behind the official story, there has been another story that is not being told. But instead of telling the truth, the policymakers are starting new adventures, as a preemptive move, to take our minds off what is really going on, to avoid reality. The dilemma that they face, though, is that they are only creating more and greater problems. It is the famous story of the Chinese box: you solve one crisis in one box, and then another crisis pops up….Instead of honestly facing the implications of that, Washington has hoped to preempt reality, by creating more problems elsewhere, primarily in this Afghanistan-South Asia region.” (EIR, January 9, 2002)

THE LIES OF THE US PRESS

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the US media were gripped by chauvinist hysteria and war psychosis. Two courageous editors, Ron Gutting of the Texas City, Texas City Sun and Dan Guthrie of the Grants Pass, Oregon, Daily Courier, where fired for lèse majesté (or was it Wehrkraftzersetzung?) when they dared to criticize Bush, including for his cowardice on 9/11. Edward Herman, professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, pointed out that “Pravda and Izvestia in the former Soviet Union would have been hard-pressed to surpass the American media in their subservience to the official agenda….They have abandoned the notion of objectivity or even the idea of providing a public space where problems are discussed and debated…. It’s a scandal that reveals the existence of a system of propaganda, not of serious media so essential in a Democratic society.” (Meyssan 2002 87)

Of course, the 9/11 myth could not have been generated and propagated by official leaks, statements, documents and reports alone. These had to be dished up to a gullible public by the corporate press, followed by the electronic media. Richard Bernstein and other New York Times staffers produced an elaboration of the official version entitled Out of the Blue: The Story of September 11, 2001, From Jihad to Ground Zero. Surely this embrace of 9/11 orthodoxy by the newspaper of record ought to give us some confidence that the basic facts have been checked? But of course the fact that one reads something in the New York Times guarantees nothing these days. The problem is not limited to the excesses of Jason Blair, who was terminated. Far more disturbing were the activities of neocon regime stenographer Judith Miller, a crony of the crank author Laurie Mylroie. Miller was responsible for uncritically purveying the lies of the Wolfowitz clique about Iraq’s phantomatic weapons of mass destruction. Partly because of Miller’s excess of neocon zeal, and absolute lack of critical screening, the New York Times was forced to apologize to its readers for its defective coverage. But unlike the hapless Blair, the disingenuous Miller, whose falsifications have contributed to a world tragedy, has continued to scribble. But if the New York Times had to apologize for serving as a megaphone for Bush’s lies of 2002 and 2003, how long will it be before they are forced to apologize for trumpeting Bush’s even bigger lies of 2001? How long will it be before the New York Times has to apologize for its pitiful propaganda piece, Out of the Blue?
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 7:21 am

PART 3 OF 3 (CH. 1 CONT'D.)

THE MEACHER CRITIQUE

A decisive turn in the transatlantic 9/11 debate came in the late summer of 2003, when the dimensions of the Anglo-American fiasco in Iraq were becoming evident. Michael Meacher had been a close associate of Tony Blair and one of the most prominent leaders of New Labour. He was a member of Parliament, and from May 1997 to June 2003, he had been the Environment Minister of Britain. Other members of the Blair cabinet, such as the former Overseas Development Minister, Claire Short, had quit over the Iraq adventure. Meacher was more courageous and more radical: he called into question the heart of the myth which the Bush administration wanted to foist off on the world. Meacher wrote:

First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16, 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.

It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that “al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House.”

Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6, 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15, 2001).

Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3, 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20, 2002).

All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at no later than 8.20 AM, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06 AM. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from US Andrews Air Force base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 AM. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13, 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: “The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence.”

Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that “casting our objectives too narrowly” risked “a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr. Bin Laden was captured.” The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that “the goal has never been to get Bin Laden” (AP, April 5, 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19, 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13, 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism. (Michael Meacher, “This war on terrorism is bogus.” The Guardian, September 6, 2003)


This is by all odds the most powerful critique of the 9/11 myth to come from an elected official in Britain. One senses the spirit of Tony Benn, the indomitable leader of the Labour left, who gave Meacher moral support. As for Claire Short, when asked in an interview if there was any common ground between Meacher’s critique of Blair and her own, she nervously replied that Meacher had taken himself completely “out of the mainstream.”

PAUL HELLYER REJECTS THE US ORTHODOXY

Another high-ranking skeptic on the official US account was Paul Hellyer, who had been Defense Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Canada in three Liberal Party governments of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Because of this, he brought the expertise of a top- ranking NATO insider to the question under consideration. Some years later, in 2004, Hellyer told an interviewer: “Terrorism is a terrible thing, but this was a police problem and an intelligence problem. What was wrong with your intelligence? Why didn't you know this was going to happen? You spend billions and billions with spooks all over the world and surely you should have known what was going on. And, so I began to be concerned about that. And then questions were raised by others. Why did the President just sit in the schoolroom when he heard the news? Why did he not acknowledge that he already knew what was going on? As a former Minister of National Defense, when the news came out I had to wonder. Why did airplanes fly around for an hour and a half without interceptors being scrambled from Andrews [Air Force Base]? Isn’t Andrews right next to the capitol?” “With a quick action alert they should have been there in five minutes or ten minutes. If not, as the Minister of National Defense, which in the United States is the Secretary of Defense, I would want to say “why not?” (911Visibility.org, May 27, 2004)

POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY

If ever the world needed voices of reason and wisdom, it was in the traumatized days after 9/11. There were still persons in the world who aspired to the title of philosophers; were they able to provide humanity with any guidance? The picture was bleak. Jürgen Habermas, the most prominent representative of what remains of the Frankfurt School, was interviewed in New York in December 2001 by Giovanna Borradori. Habermas managed a certain veneer of skepticism; he noted that “if the September 11 terror attack is supposed to constitute a caesura in world history, as many think, then it must be able to stand comparison to other events of world historical impact.” (Borradori 26) He realizes that Carl Schmitt was somehow an issue, and he criticized Schmitt as a “fascist.” (Borradori 42) He was against Samuel Huntington; he regarded Bush’s alleged war on terrorism as “a serious mistake.” (Borradori 34) But when we get to the heart of the matter, Habermas remained imprisoned within the Clarke-Tenet-Powell-Blair-Bush official version, although he was clearly uncomfortable in that prison house of the human spirit. “The monstrous act itself was new,” Habermas observed. “And I do not just mean the action of the suicide hijackers who transformed the fully fueled airplanes together with the hostages into living weapons, or even the unbearable number of victims and the dramatic extent of the devastation….one factor above all seems to me to be relevant: one never really knows who one’s enemy is. Osama Bin Laden, the person, more than likely serves the function of a stand-in …. The terrorism we associate for the time being with the name ‘al Qaeda’ makes the identification of the opponent and any realistic assessment of the danger impossible.” (Borradori 28-29) We see that Habermas, however obliquely, was content to accept the official version. Is terrorism political? “Not in the subjective sense in which Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian citizen who came from Hamburg and piloted the first of the two catastrophic airplanes, would offer you a political answer.” (Borradori 33) I myself was in Berlin on 9/11, and saw how the lurid tabloid press there, led by the Bild Zeitung, attempted to awaken a new sense of guilt in the German population because Atta, the “terror beast,” had lived in Hamburg. Postwar German philosophy had been in many ways a campaign of resistance against the Bild Zeitung and its world outlook; now Habermas capitulated.

Another leading European philosopher interviewed by Borradori was Jacques Derrida, the deconstructionist. Derrida, as always, was obscured by the clouds of his own verbiage. He had the merit of proposing at least one realistic step for the post-9/11 configuration: “What would give me the most hope in the wake of all these upheavals is a potential difference between the new figure of Europe and the United States. I say this without any Eurocentrism.” (Borradori 116) Derrida also sensed that Carl Schmitt was somehow involved. He was well aware that “it was not impossible to foresee an attack on American soil by these ‘terrorists ….’” (Borradori 91) He knew that the guerillas who fought in Afghanistan were trained by the US. (Borradori 95) Derrida commented that the values he thought were important – politics, democracy, international law, human rights – “none of this seems to have any place whatsoever in the discourse of ‘Bin Laden.’” (Borradori 113) When it came to these values, “I don’t hear any such promises coming from ‘Bin Laden,’ at least not one for this world.” (Borradori 114) Again, the unease of the inmate shut inside the prison house of the official version was palpable, but it looked like no jail break would be attempted. Derrida said he used the term “Bin Laden” as a synecdoche, but use it nevertheless he did, and not, for example, “invisible government” or “rogue network.”. From these two examples we might be tempted to conclude that, on the great questions of human progress, European philosophy represented a spent force – but this may be premature.

Probably the leading US philosopher at the moment of 9/11 was the neopragmatist Richard Rorty. In the aftermath of 9/11, Rorty moved into a position of critical support for Bush. A year later, Rorty was perhaps less enthusiastic about Bush, but still focused on the “defense of civilization against terrorism” and “the chances of further attacks.” According to Rorty, “The catastrophes that rich monomaniacs like bin Laden are now able to cause are more like earthquakes than like attempts by nations at territorial aggrandizement or attempts by criminals to get rich. We are as baffled about how to forestall the next act of terrorism as about how to forestall the next hurricane.” (The Nation, October 21, 2002) Al Qaeda is thus a force of nature, which will be buffeting us for many years. This is much inferior even to Habermas and Derrida.

For even the beginnings of a sensible summary, we must go to Trudy Govier out in Calgary, Alberta, in Canada. Govier lists four theories on 9/11: there is the Zion theory, which blames the Mossad; the theory of internal collusion, which asserts that the CIA and the FBI let it happen (sometimes abbreviated as LIHOP, let it happen on purpose); the chickens coming home to roost theory, which explains the attacks as a product of destructive US foreign policies; the Gandhian internationalist theory, which accepts the official version of 9/11 but rejects the aggressive US response; and the Standard Theory, with which we are already amply familiar. Govier’s argument against the internal collusion theory has no rigorous basis in fact or logic, but reduces everything to a matter of personal opinion (in Plato’s sense of opinion as inferior knowledge). “Were the attacks a setup?,” asks Govier. “I doubt it. The idea that US intelligence operatives would collude in such devastating attacks against their own country, including such potent symbols as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, strikes me as wildly unlikely.” (Govier 127-128) She therefore capitulates to the Standard Theory, with a nod to John Stuart Mill on the importance of dissent. Govier does not mention the more radical approach which is endorsed here, namely that 9/11 was the product of a network of moles inside the US government and intelligence agencies, backed up by covert action teams of expert professionals, seeking to provoke a war of civilizations as a means of shoring up Anglo-American world domination. The acronym for this approach is MIHOP – made it happen on purpose.

Finally, it is worthwhile to note that the entire question of 9/11 remains taboo in American politics. This question may provide the key to the demise to Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in the early months of 2004. Whatever else Dean may have been or not been, he was demonstrably the only Democratic candidate who was willing to make 9/11 and Bush’s conduct in relation to it into a campaign issue. He did so on December 2, 2003 in a radio interview with Diane Rehm on NPR. Dean suggested that Bush’s obsession with withholding documents on 9/11 might be attributable to his having known what was about to happen. “The most interesting theory I’ve heard so far – which is nothing more than a theory, it can’t be proved – is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis,” Dean remarked. This was a direct challenge to the heart of Bush’s rationale for re- election – his allegedly sterling performance in the so-called war on terror. It also tended to undermine the bi-partisan group which had been attempting to pin the 9/11 attacks on Saudi Arabia. Dean was walking on a minefield. He went on to say: “Now, who knows what the real situation is? But the trouble is, by suppressing that kind of information, you lead to those kinds of theories, whether they have any truth to them or not.” In the absence of total disclosure, Dean added, such theories will inevitably “get repeated.” He concluded that Bush “is taking a great risk by suppressing the key information that should go in the Kean Commission.” Dean’s acknowledgement that the 9/11 coverup had become a major issue was received with howls of “conspiracy theorist” from some of the corporate media who mentioned it. This incident was soon followed by a concerted campaign of denigration and ridicule against the former Vermont governor from such organs as the Washington Post. Dean, like Torricelli, had violated the oligarchical consensus which demanded silence on the real issues of 9/11.

THE FAILURE OF THE KEAN-HAMILTON 9/11 COMMISSION

The utter failure of the Commission to Investigate Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, popularly known as the 9/11 commission or the Kean-Hamilton commission, requires special attention. The Kean-Hamilton commission came into the world as an orphan. The Bush regime and the Washington oligarchy in general had never desired its creation. They had successfully fabricated and propagated the 9/11 myth, and they saw no need whatever for any further rummaging through the events of that catastrophic day. The creation of the 9/11 commission was due largely to the agitational and lobbying efforts of the 9/11 Families Steering Committee, a body largely composed of New Jersey housewives, the widows of men who had died in the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The most active among these widows was the quartet known as the Jersey girls – Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg, and Lorie van Auken. Another group had as its spokesman Stephen Push. After months of trips to Washington to lobby Congress, Kristen Breitweiser was designated by the 9/11 victims’ families to testify in the first public hearing of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JICI) inquiry at the US Capitol. The four widows soon became embittered as they saw that members of Congress and their staffs were determined to avoid the questions that seemed most important to them. They were indignant that the Ashcroft Justice Department had prescribed that “minders” had to be present whenever the JICI interviewed officials from the intelligence agencies, a rather overt form of witness intimidation which was later continued in regard to the Kean-Hamilton Commission.

They also began to notice that the FBI continued to lie systematically, and in the process they became aware of some of the anomalies in the government story. Two of the accused hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, had been known to US intelligence agencies well before 9/11, and important facts about them had been languishing unused in federal files for 15 months. As the JICI discovered, these two persons had had extensive dealings with a longtime FBI counterterrorism informant based in California. The case was very suspicious.

Since the JICI was mandated to cease its operations upon delivering its report at the end of 2003, the four widows and others began pressing for the board of inquiry which Torricelli had demanded, but which Bush had successfully blocked, during the months immediately after 9/11. This proposal was also stubbornly opposed by Bush, who wanted no further investigation at all.

In May 2002, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Daschle endorsed the idea of an independent investigating commission. There was a diehard group of partisan Republicans in the House who sought to block the probe as long as they could. They were leads by Tom Delay, who ranted that “a public commission investigating American intelligence in a time of war is ill-conceived and irresponsible.” (New York Times, May 21, 2002) This was of course what Bush and Cheney also thought.

The House finally agreed to the bill for a commission on July 25, 2002. Rep. Tim Roemer was the bill’s sponsor, and it was not a coincidence that he was later named to the commission, since he was out of the House and needed a job. After the commission was finally voted up by the Senate in late November 2002, Bush sought to name Henry Kissinger as the commission chairman. With that everyone in Washington knew that the fix was in: the new commission was intended by the establishment to carry forward the coverup, not to discover the truth about what had happened. Kissinger’s old adversary Daniel Schorr was one who said so bluntly, adding that the Bush administration was “desperately anxious” to avoid being pilloried for the obvious intelligence failures of that day. (NPR, November 30, 2002)

The bankruptcy of the 9/11 commission is expressed first of all in the conflicts of interests inherent in the pedigrees of the well-heeled insiders who composed it.

The blueblood former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, currently president of Drew University, was on the board of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Council of Prince Philip’s and Prince Bernhard’s World Wildlife Fund. He has also been on the board of Amerada Hess Corporation, which has been engaged in a joint venture with Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia. Delta Oil is owned by the bin Mafouz and al Amoudi families of Saudi Arabia, who have been charged at various times with helping to fund al Qaeda – as for example in the $1 trillion lawsuit brought by 9/11 victims’ heirs against Saudi Arabian interests. Kean has been insistently linked to Khalid bin Mafouz, one of Bin Laden’s relatives by marriage. He is on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). This is the so-called Project Democracy, a bi-partisan organ of quasi-autonomous US government subversion of the rest of the world. The NED is in effect the privatized version of the Cold War CIA under Reagan’s Executive Order 12333. This was the mother, so to speak, of the Bush 41 – Poindexter – Oliver North double dealing that history has come to know as the Iran-contra affair. In a 1987 essay entitled “Project Democracy’s Program: The Fascist Corporate State,” I had occasion to observe:

Even in an epoch full of big lies like the late 20th century, it is ironic that the financiers of the Trilateral Commission should have chosen the name “Project Democracy” to denote their organized effort to install a fascist, totalitarian regime in the United States and a fascist New Order around the world. …Project Democracy is fascist, designed to culminate in the imposition of fascist institutions on the United States, institutions that combine the distilled essence of the Nazi Behemoth and the Bolshevik Leviathan. Project Democracy is high treason, a conspiracy for the overthrow of the Constitution. An organization whose stock in trade is destabilization and putsch in so many countries around the world it can hardly be expected to halt its operations as it returns to the US border. For Project Democracy, it can happen here, it will happen here.” (Tarpley 1987 40)


Lee Hamilton may be the all-time champion as regards the sheer number of commissions he has served on. While working on the 9/11 commission, he moonlighted as president and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a thinly veiled intelligence operation. Hamilton served as congressman from Indiana for 34 years, specializing in the House International Relations Committee, which he chaired. He was also on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran – better known as the Iran- contra committee, which catapulted Oliver North to notoriety. At that time, Hamilton had commented that indictment or impeachment of Reagan or Bush would not have been “good for the country.” Instead, Hamilton supported the indictment of Reagan NSC director John Poindexter, North, and General Richard Secord, while assiduously protecting both Reagan and Vice President George Bush, the latter of whom had directed every phase of Iran-contra drug-running and gun-running (Tarpley 1992). All in all, Hamilton is 0 for 4 in finding serious malfeasance by top oligarchs in any of the investigating committees or commissions he has worked on.

John Lehman was Secretary of the Navy from 1981 to 1987, during the Reagan-Bush administrations, working with Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci. His current role was that of Wall Street corporate raider in his capacity as chairman of J. F. Lehman & Company, a private equity investment firm specialized in leveraged buyouts. Lehman counts as a Kissinger clone; he got his start as special counsel and member of the senior staff in Kissinger’s Nixon-era National Security Council. He was one of the more accomplished practitioners of psychological warfare among the commissioners, as reflected in his expert baiting of the FDNY representatives during the commission’s last hearings in New York City. Thanks in part to this arrogant performance, the last commission session in New York almost turned into a riot against the 9/11 commission, and the commissioners were no doubt glad to get out of town that day.

Jamie S. Gorelick, a partner of Wilmer, Cutler, & Pickering, was also the vice-chair of Fannie Mae, a purveyor of mortgage-backed securities which was reportedly in deep financial trouble as a result of the Greenspan housing bubble. She had been deputy Attorney General during the Clinton years. Gorelick, who served on the CIA’s National Security Advisory Panel as well as on the President’s Review of Intelligence, counted as a personal creature of CIA Director George Tenet, to whom she displayed fawning deference whenever he appeared for testimony before the 9/11 commission. Her lines of questioning typically tried to deflect guilt and opprobrium away from Langley, and towards such favored scapegoat agencies as the FAA.

James R. “Big Jim” Thompson was a Republican wheelhorse from Illinois, where he had held on as governor from 1977-1991, an all-time record for that state. He was a member of the law firm of Winston & Straw, which finds its niche in defending corporations accused of wrongdoing – among them, Philip Morris, the target of numerous class action lawsuits by tobacco victims. Thompson’s caliber may be most easily gauged from examining his role in overseeing a “corporate kleptocracy” as a member of the audit committee of Hollinger Corporation, the British intelligence front which was mercilessly looted over many years by Lord Conrad Black and his rapacious consort, Barbara Amiel, a self-styled “fascist bitch.” According to a report prepared for Hollinger by former SEC chairman Richard C. Breeden, between 1997 and 2003, Black and his management cohorts steered 95.2% of Hollinger’s gross income into their personal accounts, depriving shareholders of about $400 million of company funds. Black and Amiel reportedly viewed Hollinger as a personal “piggybank.” This neocon power couple, who had played a key role in the Clinton impeachment via their control of the London Daily Telegraph, used the Hollinger corporate jet as their personal property, shuttling among Chicago, Toronto, and vacation spots like Palm Springs and others. One 33-hour junket to Bora Bora alone cost Hollinger shareholders $533,000. Black billed the company $90,000 to refurbish his Rolls Royce, and another $8 million for memorabilia that once belonged to Franklin D. Roosevelt, about whom Black wrote a book. A birthday party organized by Black for Amiel at New York’s La Grenouille cost Hollinger $42,870. Black shoveled $5.4 million to neocon windbag Richard Perle, whom he described as a “trimmer and sharper” in private company emails. In the midst of this bacchanal sat Big Jim Thompson of the audit committee, flanked by former State Department operative Richard Burt. Thompson came in for harsh criticism in the Breeden report for having done nothing to prevent Black’s picaresque looting of Hollinger, which was supposed to be preserved as an asset of the British intelligence community. If Big Jim Thompson could not see the kleptocracy raging around him, how could he be expected to come up with any meaningful facts about 9/11? (Washington Post, September 1, 2004)

Former Senator Slade Gorton worked with the law firm of Preston, Gates & Ellis LLP. He had represented Washington state in the Senate for 18 years, 1982-2000. He himself attributed his appointment to his close personal friendship with GOP Senate leader Trent Lott, who was soon forced to quit his leadership post because of his effusive praise for Dixiecrat segregationist Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Gorton can be considered the representative of the smoke-filled room of Republican senators who exert decisive influence in the GOP.

Former Indiana Democratic Congressman Tim Roemer was a partner at Johnston and Associates, and a scholar at George Mason University in Virginia. He served on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He was part of the JICI coverup, and was one of the authors of the House bill which set up the 9/11 commission.

Fred Fielding was a senior partner with the Wiley, Rein, & Fielding law firm. He had been Reagan’s lawyer between 1981 and 1986. He had been associate counsel between 1970 and 1972, and associate counsel between 1972 and 1974. His role as Nixon’s lawyer was such that, after a multi-year probe, investigative journalism students at the University of Illinois declared that Fielding had been the fabled Deep Throat who fed leads to Woodward and Bernstein about Watergate back in 1972-74. At that time Fielding had worked in John Dean’s office.

Former Senator Max Cleland of Georgia was the one possible wild card among the commissioners. He had been defeated in his re-election bid in 2002 by an underhanded Republican campaign of character assassination waged by the shameless Saxby Chambliss. Cleland had attempted to preserve union bargaining rights and job security for the employees of the new Department of Homeland Security, but had been wildly defamed by the GOP attack machine, including the juxtaposition of his picture with that of Bin Laden. Cleland, we recall, had left two legs and one arm on the battlefield in Vietnam. In the current scoundrel time in Washington, he quickly became persona non grata.

Democratic Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste was a former federal prosecutor from New York City who gained prominence during the Watergate scandal against the Nixon White House in 1973- 74, when he was chief lawyer for the Sam Ervin Senate Watergate Committee. Since then he had been a fixture on the Democratic side of various investigations. Currently a member of the law firm Mayer, Brown, Rowe, and Maw, Ben- Veniste was previously with Weil, Gotshal, and Manges, one of the largest bankruptcy firms in the world, which was reportedly in the process of making some $200 million out of the bankruptcy proceedings of Enron, the company looted by Bush’s top backer of 2000, Ken “Kenny Boy” Lay. In the past, Ben-Veniste had represented the Iran-contra drug smuggler and pilot, Barry Seal.

Commission staff director Philip Zelikow was the director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs and White Burkett Miller professor of History at the University of Virginia. He had previously served as the executive director of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by Carter and Ford. Zelikow was one of the editors of The Kennedy Tapes, a collection marked by flawed editorial criteria and thus of dubious value to scholars. Zelikow was co-author with Condoleezza Rice of Germany Unified and Europe Transformed. As a partner with Rice in a book venture, Zelikow thus had a further crippling conflict of interest. He was also the director of the Aspen Strategy Group, a program of the utopian Aspen Institute. He is a Bushman, and was a part of the 2000-2001 Bush-Cheney transition team. Rice, for example, had been accused of covering up for a payment of some $100,000 sent to lead patsy Mohamed Atta by General Mahmoud Afmad of the Pakistani Interservices Intelligence in September 2001, almost certainly at the behest of the CIA. Zelikow was appointed by the Bush administration to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) on October 5, 2001; the PFIAB chair at that time was the lugubrious General Brent Scowcroft, formerly of Kissinger Associates. At several points in the investigation, Zelikow was forced to recuse himself, since he had been a part of the actions being probed. In another case, he was interviewed by other representatives of the 9/11 commission in relation to his role in pre-9/11 intelligence. At this rate Zelikow could have simplified the investigation by interviewing himself.

The resident lawyer of the 9/11 commission was David Marcus of the arch-establishment law firm of Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering. One of the clients of this law firm was Saudi Prince Mohammed al Faisal, who was named as one of the three most important financiers of 9/11 in the $1 trillion families’ lawsuit. (Michel Chossudovsky, “Who’s Who on the 9/11 ‘Independent’ Commission,” globalresearch.ca; Joyce Lynn, “The 9/11 Cover-Up Commission,” http://www.communitycurrency.org/joycelynn.html)

Four out of the ten commissioners – Kean, Hamilton, Lehman, and Gorelick – were members of the elitist Council on Foreign Relations in New York City.

As if to document its lack of seriousness, the 9/11 commission was indifferent to a glaring case of perjury that occurred on the part of witnesses testifying under oath. In one session, former FBI Acting Director Thomas Pickard testified that Attorney General John Ashcroft had told him before 9/11 not to provide any more briefings on the terrorist threat, since he was not interested in hearing them. Ashcroft later directly denied that this was true. One of the two, most likely Ashcroft, was lying on a matter of considerable materiality. But the 9/11 commission never acted.

The 9/11 families had expected that at least one of their number would be named as a member of the new commission which they had bludgeoned a very unwilling Washington establishment into setting up. When the appointments came out, the commission was composed of hacks, wheelhorses, and professional insiders from the two political parties. The most the families and their allies could manage was to get Mindy Kleinberg on the agenda for a hard-hitting presentation to one of the early public plenary sessions of the commission. The commissioners listened politely, thanked Ms. Kleinberg extensively, and proceeded completely to ignore the letter and the spirit of her remarks. (New York Observer, September 14, 2003)

The 9/11 commission was never a fighting investigation, like the Church Committee and the Pike Committee back during the Ford administration. The Pike Committee, we must recall, once issued a richly deserved contempt of Congress citation against Henry Kissinger. The only time it looked like the Kean-Hamilton Commission might actually be going somewhere came towards the end of 2003, when Commissioner Max Cleland became indignant about the high-handed arrogance with which the Bush White House was insisting on conducting its coverup. The Commission, which was armed with subpoena power, had chosen to negotiate with Bush about its access to important White House documents, notably the presidential daily briefings about which certain details had come out through the earlier probes. Bush was offering to let two members of the commission see the a pre-censored selection of the sensitive documents in question, in a guarded room, without the possibility of taking notes. Cleland, for whom the defeat at the hands of Saxby Chambliss in the 2002 election still rankled, became indignant with the sort of righteous anger which is so seldom seen in today’s Washington. Calling the Bush proposal “disgusting,” and warning against dirty deals, Cleland forthrightly demanded that all the commissioners be able to see all the documents they wanted and take all the notes they thought necessary. (New York Times, October 26, 2003) If Bush chose to oppose this, then the commission would have to use its subpoena powers, and let the matter play out through the courts – incidentally inflicting maximum public relations damage on the always-surreptitious Bush. Just as it appeared that Cleland and perhaps one or two other commissioners were about to clash with Governor Kean and Congressman Hamilton, it was announced that Cleland would be departing the commission to accept a post on the board of directors of the Export-Import Bank. According to the statute that set up the commission, these two jobs could not be held at the same time. The old warrior’s courage had failed him. Who knows what threats had been issued to secure this outcome?

But Cleland’s departure meant that there was a vacancy on the commission which now had to be filled. This time a group of family activists officially nominated Kristen Breitweiser for the seat being vacated by Cleland. But, in an act of cynical contempt for the families and their sacrifices, Senator Daschle, in whose power it was to nominate a successor, chose instead to name former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerry, currently the head of the New School University in New York City. Kerry was an austerity Democrat and deficit hawk from the right wing of his party who had developed into a very vehement warmonger and xenophobe in the days after 9/11. Subjects like Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda could evoke from him adamant demands for US military retaliation that bordered on psychotic episodes.

For Kerry was not only a troubled man; he was reportedly a war criminal of the Vietnam era. As recounted by Newsweek correspondent Gregory L. Vistica in his article “One Awful Night in Thanh Phong” (New York Times Magazine, April 25, 2001), one night in 1969 “Kerry’s Raiders” had attacked the small Vietnamese hamlet of Thanh Phong, slaughtering at least 13 civilians, including women, old men, and children. This account, relying heavily on the testimony of Gerhard Klann, one of Kerry’s fellow Navy Seals, recounts how Kerry helped Klann dispatch an elderly Vietnamese man, holding him down while Klann cut his throat with a bayonet. Disturbingly, Kerry reportedly claims nowadays that he does not remember his role in the slaying of the old man. If true, this obviously suggested that his mental equipment was not up to the task of serving on such an important commission. (See also Justin Raimondo, “Is Bob Kerrey a War Criminal? Yes.” http://www.antiwar.com, April 27, 200)

The 9/11 commission was stonewalled by the FAA, JCS, CIA, NORAD, and Homeland Security. FAA and NORAD were so reticent that subpoenas were finally issued to get them to disgorge documents. At first, witnesses before the 9/11 commission were not even sworn in under oath. This changed under pressure from the bereaved families. The administration intimidated witnesses, with minders – overseers from the agency they worked for – present during the testimony at all times to make sure they did not get too talkative. The final report of the 9/11 commission was “vetted,” meaning censored or screened, by the Bush White House.

The apex of interest in the 9/11 commission was the Clarke testimony of April 2004, which resulted in the declassification and publication of Clarke’s famous Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, 2001 entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” This was a document which Rice had claimed contained merely historical data. However, the net effect was to strengthen the myth, not to broaden the horizons of the public. This, of course, was Clarke’s intent. Condoleezza Rice first refused to appear, until public pressure became unbearable. But when she did show up the results were disappointing.

When the 9/11 commission report was released on July 22, 2004, it received the approval of a bi-partisan oligarchical consensus. The ruling elite approved of the coverup, and also approved of the recommendations for structural reform, notably the idea of having a single intelligence czar of cabinet rank to preside over CIA, DIA, NSA, and the rest. In reality, the nation would be better served by keeping the present fragmented system, since it provided a pluralism of opinion, and could not so easily be dragooned in a given direction. What if the intelligence czar were a neocon of the ilk of Feith, Luti, or Schulsky? Under the current system, there was always the chance that one intelligence agency might help the country by investigating the crimes of another intelligence agency. But that seemed to be precisely what the Kean-Hamilton consensus did not want.

There were a few dissident voices in the controlled corporate media. William Raspberry condemned the 9/11 commission report as “a childlike explanation” which managed to avoid any semblance of individual responsibility,” analogous to a child’s saying “The lamp broke.” Raspberry quoted CIA alumnus Ray McGovern of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity commenting that “the whole name of the game is to exculpate anyone in the establishment…why is it that after all this evidence and months and months of testimony, the commission found itself unable even to say if the attacks could have been prevented?” McGovern’s overall estimate of the 9/11 commission itself: “This commission is not representative of America or of the families of those who died in 9/11. It is an archetypically establishment body, consisting of people who, with the exception of a token white woman, look exactly like me. They are all lawyers or politicians or both – and all acceptable to Vice President Cheney, who didn’t want a commission in the first place. The result is facile, mischievous, and disingenuous.” (Washington Post, July 26, 2004)

As a result of the official failure to provide a competent investigation of the 9/11 events, there has been absolutely no accountability or responsibility for what occurred. The JICI and the Kean-Hamilton commission agreed in essence that, although there was certainly an intelligence failure, it was systemic, meaning that no individuals were responsible. In bureaucratic usage, the propositions that everyone was responsible means that in practical terms no one was responsible. The only official of any note whose career seems to have been harmed by 9/11 was the security director of the FAA, and even he was allowed to resign.

In the US Navy, a captain who runs his ship aground is relieved of command, no matter whose fault it turns out to be. In many countries, if the national team does poorly in the World Cup soccer championships, the sports minister must resign. In other countries, if a train wreck occurs, the transportation minister is automatically required to step down. This is the principle of ministerial responsibility, the overall political responsibility of the head of an executive department.

After 9/11, the Bush administration did not observe this principle. Instead, figures like Ashcroft argued in effect that, the greater the disasters that occurred on their watch, the more numerous their failures, the more emergency powers they deserved to be given. Their maxim was “the more I fail, the more dictatorial power I deserve to have.” Ashcroft seemed to think that he was entitled to bungle his way into a dictatorship. Such an arrangement provides a positive stimulus for bureaucrats to be less than zealous in preventing disasters from being visited on the citizens. The principle of ministerial responsibility provides the most rudimentary and the most essential reality principle for government officials: the sure knowledge that if catastrophes take place on their watch, they will be sacked. In an oligarchical system like ours, this is absolutely necessary to create a minimum common interest between security officials and the citizens. The alien neocon notion of martial law abolishes this reality principle by threatening to freeze the failed officials in power as a reward for their own bungling incompetence – or for their treasonous complicity.

The following comments on the Gunpowder Plot of nearly four hundred years ago bear an eerie resemblance to the 9/11 operation: “The determined manner in which this object was ever kept in view, the unscrupulous means constantly employed for its attainment, the vehemence with which matters were asserted to have been proved, any proof of which was never seriously attempted – in a word, the elaborate system of falsification by which alone the story of the conspiracy was made to suit the purpose it so efficiently served, can inspire us with no confidence that the foundation upon which such a superstructure was erected, was itself what it was said to be. On the other hand, when we examine into the details supplied to us as to the progress of the affair, we find that much of what the conspirators are said to have done is well-nigh incredible, while it is utterly impossible that if they really acted in the manner described, the public authorities should not have had full knowledge of their proceedings.” (Gerard 16-17) These comments on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 are equally applicable to the 9/11 attacks of four centuries later. The Anglo-American financier faction, whose birth was marked by terrorism under James I, has resorted to even more spectacular terrorism in the epoch of its historic decline.

And so we say to all persons of good will: you would never believe the utterances of Bush & Co. about any issue of importance without independently verifying the facts. Why do you persist in believing Bush on the most central question of our time, 9/11?

On September 14, 2001, the US Congress, contemptuously flaunting the lessons of the infamous and fraudulent Golf of Tonkin resolution of August 1964, which had been paid for with the lives of 50,000 Americans and a million Vietnamese, gave Bush carte blanche to wage war, authorizing him to employ “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons.” The only dissenting voice was that of Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, who defended the honor of the American people with her superb courage in the face of hysteria. It is Bush’s determination of those who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 events which we must now examine.

_______________

Notes:

1. Citations from newspapers of the Arab and Islamic world are from Cameron S. Brown, “The Shot Heard Round the World: Middle East Reactions to September 11,” in Middle East Review of International Affairs, vol. 5, no. 4, December 2001.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:02 am

PART 1 OF 3

II: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF SYNTHETIC TERRORISM

And yet the entire Republic is shaken and disconcerted by these seditious provocations, and precisely by the action of those who should have been the first to prevent them….
-- Sallust


The original title for this section was “the theory and practice of state-sponsored, false-flag, synthetic terrorism. Instead, I have let “synthetic terrorism” sum up this entire concept. In any political system which relies to even a small extent for its continued existence on the consent of the governed, some form of popular legitimation is necessary. But what happens when the wars, policies and institutional changes desired by the ruling elite cannot be understood or supported by the vast majority of the citizens? What happens if the oligarchical nature of the system endows it with such inertia that it cannot be motivated to act in the way in which the most powerful oligarchical factions desire? Under these conditions, especially if the political and economic systems are in crisis, state sponsored terrorism may emerge. Here we are not describing the way in which statesmen, generals and intelligence officers ought to act; we are describing the way in which they have acted and continue to act. What we offer here can be thought of as a theory of synthetic terrorism. This terrorism is synthetic because it brings together the efforts of a number of disparate components: patsies, moles, professionals, media, and controllers. It is also synthetic in the sense that it is artificial: it does not grow up spontaneously out of despair and oppression, but is rather the product of an effort of organization and direction in which factions of government play an indispensable role.

We are not offering erudite scholarship isolated from public affairs, but an active intervention against the ongoing attempt to build an entire international system on a monstrous falsehood.

We must stress the idea that the vast majority of international terrorism conducted on a spectacular scale is indeed state-sponsored terrorism. This does not mean that such terrorism is sponsored by the entire government, down to the last GS-4 clerical worker doing data entry for the Social Security Administration. It does mean that a faction or network of the government uses its access to the levers of power to promote the terrorist action in various ways. In Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the Arab and Islamic world today, there have been deluded and naïve individuals and institutions who have somehow associated large-scale international terrorism with revolutionary or progressive change, or with the establishment of international justice. Nothing could be further from the truth. If the Italian left of the 1970s and the German left of the same period sympathized with the Red Brigades or the Baader-Meinhof group/Red Army faction, they only showed their own stupidity, since both of these terrorist operations were created by and controlled by NATO intelligence. Similarly, any Arab who feels sympathy for al Qaeda needs to be forcefully reminded that al Qaeda was created by the CIA and continues to be steered by the CIA, through various cut-outs and mediations. Terrorism, which was advertised as a desperate aid to oppressed peoples, has most often had the opposite effect: the attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972, the first spectacular blowing up of airliners, the Achille Lauro – these were actions which set the Palestinian cause back 20 years.

Terrorism in the modern era is the means by which oligarchies wage secret wars against the people, under conditions in which it would be politically impossible to wage the same war openly. Oligarchy, in turn, always has one and the same political program, which has not changed since the time of Thucydides, Plato and the writer that classical historians call The Old Oligarch: the purpose and program of oligarchy is to perpetuate oligarchy. The specific political and economic form of the oligarchy is much less important. The nomenklatura of the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was supposedly based on state property of the means of production, the primacy of the Communist Party, and Marxist ideology, but they proved more than willing to throw all that out the window when they realized that their oligarchical status and special privilege could not be preserved under communist auspices. Having understood this, the Soviet oligarchs were eager to transform themselves into stockjobbers, speculators, profiteers, and young wolves (as Zhirinovsky put it) under the auspices of wild laissez-faire capitalism. What was important to them was to preserve their status as an oligarchy. This is an important lesson, since it shows that we must be deeply suspicious of the ruling elite of the United States, which is of course also an oligarchy, but an oligarchy which operates behind the mask of democratic institutions and formal democracy. The experience of the USSR suggests that the US oligarchy will be more than willing to trade in its democratic costumes for a bureaucratic-authoritarian or even totalitarian garb if the democratic forms prove to be impossible to maintain, most likely because of financial and economic difficulties.

The naive view of terrorism is that it grows up directly out of oppression, economic misery, and political despair. Oppressed and exploited people, or those who have been colonized by a foreign power, come together spontaneously in ones and twos, create an organization, and after a certain time of preparation go over to armed struggle against their oppressors or occupiers. But this is the rarest of exceptions.

This view pays no attention to the most important institutional actor in the world of terrorism – secret intelligence agencies like CIA, FBI, NSA, KGB, Stasi, MI-6, and the rest. Secret intelligence agencies are institutions in which the very essence of oligarchy is at work. Secret intelligence agencies in their modern forms go back to the Republic of Venice, which was famous for its intelligence directorate, the Council of Ten, and its pervasive network of spies, informers, and provocateurs. And the Republic of Venice was the longest-lasting oligarchical system in world history. Despite their cultural differences, all of these secret intelligence agencies are fundamentally alike. Terrorism generally starts within these secret agencies, or nowadays more likely in their privatized tentacles – as for example the intelligence community in the United States has existed since President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333.

Secret intelligence agencies are fatalists to the extent that they regard all large-scale sociological and political changes as inevitable. As soon as they identify a new phenomenon which they have not yet penetrated, their only thought is how to infiltrate their agents and assets into it, so they can steer it or influence it when the time comes. Whenever the leaders of intelligence agencies see a train leaving the station, their only thought is to climb on board, quite irrespective of the destination, as Gen. Paul Albert Scherer, the former head of West Germany’s Military Counter- intelligence (Militärischer Abschirmdienst) and one of the greatest experts in this field, assured me some years back. This applies to terrorist groups most emphatically. Here the attention of the secret intelligence agencies is so strongly focused that their task is most often that of founding, and much more seldom that of infiltrating and taking over some group which already exists.

The world of secret intelligence agencies is a realm of falsehood, camouflage, deception, violence, unspeakable cruelty, treachery, and betrayal. It is the most desolate and grim sector of human endeavor, where no human values can subsist. It knows neither hope nor mercy nor redemption. It is the one area of human life where Hobbes’s maxim holds true – it is the war of all against all. But not as chaos – as an ultimately controlled phenomenon which serves the goal of preserving the state power that the intelligence agencies serve. During the Cold War, the conflict of CIA, MI-6, SDECE, KGB, BND, Stasi and the rest was called the wilderness of mirrors, a desert populated by agents, double agents, triple agents, multiple agents, their case officers, their counterintelligence opponents, and the omnipresent specialists in mokrie dela – wetwork, or assassinations, as the KGB described them.

We start from the strong presumption that terrorism is therefore an activity which is controlled by a faction of government, probably acting under the influence of financier factions which are generally the ultimate source of authority in the globalized universe after 1991. Terrorism cannot be described as a spontaneous sociological phenomenon, as the old saying goes – it must rather be seen as a phenomenon developed by sociologists, along with psychologists, profilers, psychiatrists, case officers, handlers, and cut-outs. For every terrorist and terrorist group in the field, an extensive bureaucratic support system is necessary. Spontaneous combustion is the last thing that should be expected.

This is an important point, to which we will return. The naïve or spontaneous theory of terrorism sees the terror group as sprouting up directly out of the compost of misery, poverty, and desperation. Our point here is that this explanation neglects the crucial, indispensable role of the secret intelligence agency, which is usually present at the creation of the terror group, or very soon thereafter. The well-known Indian author Arundhati Roy told the American Sociological Association in San Francisco on August 16, 2004 that “terrorism is the privatization of war” and that “terrorists are the free marketers of war.” These are striking formulations, but this does not prevent them from leading in the wrong direction. Synthetic terrorism remains very much under state control; it is only that the puppetmaster’s strings are well concealed from those who do not know what to look for, or who do not want to know. Thus, a CIA front corporation is not really part of the private sector – it is an emanation of Langley just as surely as the local station chief and his staff.

But it should also be clear that state sponsored terrorism cannot call itself by its own real name. It must necessarily masquerade as an authentic voice of the oppressed – be they Arabs, Moslems, workers, national minorities, or whatever. The terror groups cannot be labeled CIA or KGB – they must call themselves Red Brigades, Red Army faction, ETA, or al Qaeda. The false flag and false ideology allows the terror group to pretend that it is something that it is not, and to convince billions of naïve viewers of CNN or al Jazeera that the false dumb-show is indeed reality.

In the nineteenth century, the great headquarters of international terrorism was London. The defense of the empire required operations which the public decorum of the Victorian era could not openly avow. The main vehicle for British terrorist operations in Europe was Giuseppe Mazzini and his phalanx of organizations starting from Young Italy: Young Germany, Young France, Young Poland, Young Turkey, Young America. Mazzini was a paid agent of the British Admiralty, and received his funding through Admiralty official James Stansfeld. Mazzini’s terrorism was directed against what the British called “the arbitrary powers”: Prussia, Russia, and Austria. Each of these had a large population of oppressed nationalities, and Mazzini created a terrorist group for each one of them, often promising the same territory to two or more of his national sections. The important thing was that rulers and officials be assassinated, and bombs thrown. The net effect of all this can be gauged by the complaint of an Austrian about Mazzini’s operations in Italy: Mazzini aimed at making Italy turbulent, he lamented, which was bad for Austria, but without making Italy strong, which might be bad for the British. Mazzini operated out of London during his entire career, which simply means that he was officially sanctioned, as were anarchists like Bakunin and a whole tribe of nihilists. Mazzini worked well for Europe – including the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. For other parts of the world, the Admiralty had specialized operations.

State-sponsored terrorism can have a number of goals. One of these is to eliminate a politician, business leader. Back around 1500, Niccolò Machiavelli included a long chapter on conspiracies in his masterwork, The Discourses. For Machiavelli, a conspiracy meant an operation designed to assassinate the ruler of a state, and to take his place by seizing power. Modern terrorism is more subtle: by eliminating a leading politician, it seeks to change the policy direction of the government that politician was leading. The paradox here is that a faction or network penetrating the state sometimes undertakes the elimination of the head of state or head of government, and often a very eminent and beloved one.

A good example is the French Fifth Republic under President Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle would not accept the demand of the US and UK to dictate policy to France as a member of the Atlantic Alliance. De Gaulle took France out of the NATO supernational command, ejected the NATO headquarters from its home near Paris, condemned the Vietnam war, refused the British entry into the European Economic Community, challenged the US to pay its foreign obligations in gold rather than paper dollars, called for a free Quebec, and otherwise demonstrated creative independence from the Anglo- Americans. The result was a series of approximately 30 assassination attempts, carried out by French right- ing extremists. but with the Anglo-American secret services lurking in the background. None of the attempts to assassinate De Gaulle was successful.

Another example was Enrico Mattei, the head of the Italian state oil company ENI. Mattei challenged the hegemony of the US-UK seven sisters oil cartel. He offered Arab oil producers a 50-50 split of the profits, far more than the Anglo-Americans were offering, and he was willing to help the Arabs with their own economic development. Mattei was growing powerful enough to challenge the subordination of Italy to the US- UK domination of NATO when his private jet crashed near Milan in October 1962, an event which can be attributed to sabotage on the part of the CIA and its alliances, among them some of the French Algerians who were also the enemies of de Gaulle. After Mattei’s death, ENI began to abide by the rules of the Anglo-American oil cartel.

The classic example of political assassination was the murder of President Kennedy. Kennedy had been alerted by the Bay of Pigs debacle to the treachery and incompetence of CIA director Allen Dulles, whom he fired. He refused to listen to the adventurist advice of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He overrode his main military advisers, Lyman Lemnitzer and Curtis LeMay, who wanted to make the Cuban missile crisis the occasion for general thermonuclear war with the USSR. Kennedy clashed with Roger Blough of US Steel, who was acting as a representative of Wall Street. Kennedy challenged the power of the Federal Reserve to be the sole controller of the US money supply. Kennedy seemed determined to return to the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and also to the strong presidency Roosevelt had embodied, but which the US oligarchy was determined never to permit again. (There had in any case been an attempt to assassinate FDR in Florida before he was even inaugurated.) Kennedy was probably planning to fire FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, who regarded himself as an unaccountable state within the state. Documents indicate that Kennedy was scaling down the US presence in Vietnam, rather than escalating it as his incompetent hawkish advisers wanted, and that he may have been preparing to liquidate the Vietnam matter entirely after his re-election in November 1964. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November, 1963.

Somewhere in the mid-1960s a watershed in the annals of terrorism is passed. Up to this point, key person assassinations are carried out by disgruntled officers or colonial refugees, by itinerant misfits like Oswald, or are simply anonymous. After this point, assassinations start to be attributed to revolutionary or subversive groups. During the 1980s and 1990s, those groups gradually drop their Marxist-Lenininst camouflage and in many cases assume a right-wing anarchist or Islamist coloration.

In Germany, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder was the chief of the Trusteeship Agency (Treuhand), which was in 1991 the largest corporation in the world. In the communist German Democratic Republic, all industry was the property of the state, and when the GDR collapsed in 1989, this property was transferred to the Trusteeship Agency. Rohwedder, as the head of this entity, preferred to keep the vast state property of the GDR as a state sector, trying to maintain existing levels of employment and production so as to facilitate the absorption of the East German regions into unified Germany. Anglo-American financiers, however, wanted all the GDR state property to be put on the auction block at once, so that it could be sold off at bargain basement prices from which Wall Street and the City of London had everything to gain. When Rohwedder proved reluctant to accept this policy, he was assassinated around Easter 1991, just after the first Gulf War, by a group claiming to be the Baader-Meinhof group, also known as the Red Army faction. Rohwedder’s successor immediately began selling off GDR state property in the way the Anglo-Americans wanted.

Aldo Moro was the head of the Italian Christian Democratic Party. During the 1970s he was the leading advocate of a policy of bringing the Italian Communist Party (PCI) into the government. This would have given the Italian government a solid majority for the first time in many decades, putting an end to the constant parade of government crises and weak, unstable coalitions cobbled together with the help of splinter parties. At a certain point, Moro was warned by a key US figure, identified by some as former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to cease his efforts to bring the PCI into the government, as Moro’s widow later reported. In March, 1978 this warning was followed by a terrorist attack on Moro’s motorcade, in which several of his security detail were killed. Moro himself was abducted. Responsibility was claimed by the Red Brigades. After two months of captivity, Moro was killed by his captors and his body found in the trunk of a car in downtown Rome. After his death, the PCI was not allowed to enter the government.

As the examples have suggested, the leading terrorist state of the post-1945 era in Europe was unquestionably the United States, often acting together with the British MI-5 and MI-6 in the framework of NATO intelligence. US state-sponsored terrorism generally aimed at maintaining what can be called the division of the world into spheres of influence as established at the Big Three (US, UK, USSR) conference at Yalta in the Crimea in early 1945. Since the US could not simply arrest and execute its opponents in the way that Stalin could, terrorism was a favored tool of the US in attempting to maintain domination and discipline within the western bloc. Terrorism was thus used against political challenges, like that of Moro, against economic challenges, like those of Mattei and Rohwedder, or against figures who represented multiple challenges, like President de Gaulle. In the cases of President Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, terrorism was employed to prevent reforms of the system which decisive groups did not desire, and which they despaired of blocking through normal political means. The anti- slavery reforms of the Gracchi brothers were the only way to preserve the Roman Republic, but the latifundists and slaveholders felt mortally threatened by them, so the Gracchi were both assassinated.

Terrorism can also be employed to create a radical change in a political situation or political process. A good example from the postwar period is the terrorist bombing attack on a bank located in Piazza Fontana in Milan, Italy, on December 12, 1969, killing 16 and seriously injuring 88 more – a shocking toll in those days, and a source of horror for public opinion in general. This bombing took place at the height of the biggest strike wave that Italy had seen since the end of World War II, the so-called Hot Autumn, in which the automobile workers and metal workers had proven to be especially aggressive and militant. The bombings achieved the remarkable feat of stopping this broadly based and energetic strike wave dead in its tracks, with all strikes being called off as the police ran wild, hauling suspected leftist sympathizers in for questioning and intimidating their families. This successful method of social control was called the “strategy of tension,” and it included emergency laws against suspected terrorists and other favorite measures of Ashcroft today. The Piazza Fontana bombs were blamed by the police and the press on a pathetic group of anarchists, the Bakunin Club. Among the members of the Bakunin Club, which had been thoroughly penetrated by the Italian intelligence service, the SID, were the railroad worker Giuseppe Pinelli and the male dancer Pietro Valpreda. Pinelli was pushed to his death from a fourth-story window in police headquarters, while Valpreda was vilified as a subhuman beast by the mass media. When the absurd attempt to pin the atrocity on the anarchists collapsed of its own weight, the next prime suspects became Freda and Ventura, two self-styled “Nazi-Maoists.” More than twenty years after the fact, information came into the public domain that the bombs of Piazza Fontana had been placed by a secret network called GLADIO operating under the control of NATO intelligence, which evidently feared that the success of the strike wave might lead to the entry of the PCI into the government, which in turn might have led to the erosion of the NATO alliance as against the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact.

All during the 1970s and into the 1980s, US, NATO and Italian ruling circles were obsessed with keeping the PCI out of the government, and with breaking the back of workers militancy. Terrorists incidents included a bomb which went off during a trade union demonstration against fascism at Piazza della Loggia in Brescia in May 1974 (8 dead, 100 injured), a bomb on the Italicus express train in August 1974 (12 dead, 48 injured), and many more. The most spectacular event in this series was the bomb at the Bologna railway station on August 2, 1980, which killed 85 and injured some 200. This was the biggest terrorist attack in Europe before the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004, and shows a similar modus operandi.

Terrorism thus has been known to provide a means of social control. Parts of the US oligarchy are today almost euphoric about the seemingly endless panorama of possibilities for exploiting terrorism they believe they see before them. But it is not wise to try to build an entire state and social order on terrorism.

Another major goal of terrorism has been to provoke war. In this variant, state-sponsored false flag terrorist groups carry out an attack against the power that wants to go to war, which uses the attacks as a moral pretext to rally its own population for conflict, whipping up sentiment by waving the bloody shirt of the victims, the insult to the national honor, and the monstrous evil of the sub- human perpetrators.

The logic here is that of the provocation which can be observed along the fringes of any demonstration which the government does not want to take place. The demonstration proceeds peacefully and responsibly, with marchers walking an orderly fashion within the cordons of parade marshals who are there to prevent trouble. Families with children, elderly people, and youth are all petitioning effectively for the redress of their grievances. The political effect is potentially quite positive. All of a sudden, a group of radical demonstrators, calling themselves anarchists but in reality police agent provocateurs, breaks away from the main body of the demonstration and begins smashing the windows of stores along the route. The anarchists have Molotov cocktails in hand, and they hurl them at the first units of riot police who arrive, injuring some of them seriously. The police, by now thoroughly provoked indeed, begin to fire tear gas grenades in all directions, and wade in to the peaceful crowd with their truncheons, mercilessly beating everyone who falls into their hands. Demonstrators are herded into blind allies, beaten, arrested, and carted off. It will be a long time before some of them come to another demonstration. Television coverage focuses on the violent minority, trying to make it look like the anarchist police agents are typical of the demonstration as a whole. Pundits pontificate; George Will is particularly indignant. This is the model for provocations of all types. It represents a spectacle for the gullible, a theatrical if bloody manipulation of staged pseudo-reality, and it points toward the reality of 9/11.

War commonly begins with provocations of this sort. The colossal bloodletting of World War began in Sarajevo, Bosnia with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by a Serbian nationalist fanatic named Gavrilo Prinkip, an activist of the group called the Black Hand, a Mazzini-style Serbian underground national liberation group. But the Black Hand was controlled by Serbian military intelligence. Colonel Apis of Serbian military intelligence was in turn an asset of the Okhrana, the Russian intelligence, through the Russian military attaché in Belgrade, and he and Prinkip may also have been under the influence of the British-backed Grand Orient freemasons, which had been working towards a general European war since about 1906-7.

Another case was the explosion of the battleship USS Maine in the harbor of Spanish-controlled Havana, Cuba in 1898. The jingoistic Hearst newspapers, the original of modern yellow journalism, blamed the Spanish government and called for war against Spain, which soon ensued. The Hearst papers argued that the US warship had been sunk by the detonation of a Spanish mine, and drew imaginative cartoons to show how this might have happened. This war is a fateful turning-point in world history, since it marks the launching of US imperialism on the world stage. But an inquiry conducted decades later by retired Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the US nuclear Navy, led to the conclusion that the explosion had taken place inside the Maine, probably as the result of sparks amidst the coal dust of an empty coal bunker, a fairly well-known danger in those days. But it may also be that the internal explosion was not an accident, but rather the result of a deliberately placed bomb.

World War II also began with a provocation, at least as far as Germany is concerned. When Hitler wanted to invade Poland in September 1939, he knew that the majority of the German population did not want war. He accordingly hatched a plot which centered on the Gleiwitz radio station, a German broadcasting station located near the border with Poland. In late August 1939, Hitler obtained a group of German convicts, and dressed them in Polish army uniforms. These wretched men were then taken to the Gleiwitz radio station and machine-gunned to death. Their bodies were arranged around the radio station in such a way as to suggest that they had been shot while storming the building. Nazi agents inside the radio station then broke into the ongoing program to read a raving anti-German declaration in Polish, proclaiming that Polish forces had taken over Gleiwitz and the radio there. This crude farce, when amplified and repeated hundreds of times by Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda machinery, secured at least minimal acceptance by the German population of the inevitability of war, which broke out with Hitler’s attack on Poland, September 1, 1939.

The classic case of strategic terrorism of this type is doubtless the Gunpowder Plot of November 5, 1605, a day that is still marked each year in the English calendar as Guy Fawkes’ Day. In 1605 James I Stuart, a Protestant who united in his person the crowns of Scotland and England for the first time, was considering a policy of accommodation with the Spanish Empire, the leading Catholic power. James was also considering some measures of toleration for Catholics in England, where the majority of the landed gentry in the north of the country was still loyal to Rome. An influential group in London, backed by Venetian intelligence from abroad, wanted to push James I into a confrontation with the Spanish Empire, from which they hoped among other things to extract great personal profit. They also thought it was politically vital to keep persecuting the Roman Catholics. Chief among the war party was the royal chancellor, roughly the prime minister, who was Lord Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury. Cecil set out to convince James I to adopt his policy, and to accomplish this by means of terrorism. Acting behind the scenes, Cecil cultivated some prominent Catholics, one of them Lord Thomas Percy from the famous Catholic Percy family, and used them as cut-outs to direct the operations of a group of naïve Catholic fanatics and adventurers, among them a certain gullible gentleman named Guy Fawkes. Thomas Percy was supposedly a Catholic fanatic, but in reality was a bigamist. This group of Catholic fanatics hatched the idea first of tunneling into the basement of the Houses of Parliament from a nearby house, and then simply of renting the basement of the Houses of Parliament, in order to pack that basement with explosives for the purpose of blowing up King, Lords, and Commons when James I came to open the Parliament early that November. But instead Guy Fawkes was caught going into the basement the night before the great crime was scheduled to occur. Fawkes and the rest of the plotters were tortured and hanged, and several Catholic clergy were also scapegoated. James I put aside his plans for toleration of Catholics, and England set out on a century of wars against the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, from which in turn the British Empire was born. Guy Fawkes Day became the yearly festival of “no popery” and hatred for Spain.

Concerning the Gunpowder Plot, the Jesuit Gerard concludes that “for purposes of State, the government of the day [meaning Cecil] either found means to instigate the conspirators to undertake their enterprise, or, at least, being, from an early stage of the undertaking, fully aware of what was going on, sedulously nursed the insane scheme till the time came to make capital out of it. That the conspirators, or the greater number of them, really meant to strike a great blow is not to be denied, though it may be less easy to assure ourselves of its precise character; and their guilt will not be palliated should it appear that, in projecting an atrocious crime, they were unwittingly playing the game of plotters more astute than themselves.” (Gerard 17) Here we have an excellent definition of state-sponsored terrorism. Gerard’s method of proof is this: “It will be enough to show that, whatever its origin, the conspiracy was, and must have been, known to those in power, who, playing with their infatuated dupes, allowed them to go on with their mad scheme, till the moment came to strike with full effect.” (Gerard 55) This can also be applied to 9/11.

It should be added that James I does not seem to have been aware of the operation in advance. The plot was not directed against James I; it rather intended to push him in a specific policy direction. After November 1605, James I does appear to have realized what Cecil’s role had been, at least to some extent.

Father Gerard speaks of Thomas Percy, Cecil’s agent in the Gunpowder Plot, as a “tame duck employed to catch the wild ones.” (Gerard 152) But the fact that he was Cecil’s agent did not prevent Percy from being killed as part of the coverup after November 5. At the risk of mixing metaphors, we can cite the opinion of a contemporary observer that Cecil, one he had secured the game birds he was seeking, hanged the spaniel who had actually caught them for him, “that its master’s art might not appear.” (Gerard 153)

Towards the end of the 1600s, some leaders of the Whig ministry decided that France, not Spain, was now the leading Catholic power. In 1678 they brought forth the charlatan Titus Oates to allege that he had proofs of a “popish plot” backed by France to restore Catholicism in England, including by manipulating the royal succession. Oates may be usefully compared to the many “anti-terrorism experts” who appear on television news broadcasts to report on what the terrorists are doing, since it is clear that most of what these commentators say they have simply invented. When Oates began to recite his charges there was mass hysteria in England, and several Jesuits were hanged. The diarist John Evelyn had never seen “the nation in more apprehension and consternation.” So great was the fear that “…before the end of 1678 not only did a majority of the English people believe that there was such a plot, but anyone who ventured to deny it ran the risk of impeachment as an accessory. ‘’Twas worse than plotting to suspect the Plot.’” (Hay 122) The popish plot had enormous mass appeal: “the extravagant frenzy of the London mob took most people by surprise … London witnessed an exhibition of emotional fanaticism which has seldom been equaled in the history of a civilized nation. Mobs have often been as wicked, but not often so stupid. ‘The imposture known as the Oates Plot,’ wrote Lingard, ‘supported by the arts and declamations of a numerous party, goaded the passions of men to a state of madness, and seemed to extinguish the native good sense and humanity of the English character.” (Hay122-3) The great sponsor of Titus Oates was Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, the founder of the Whig Party and a member of the oligarchical cabinet called the CABAL after the initials of its members: Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. The philosopher John Locke was Ashley’s secretary. In the late summer of 1679 the hysteria began to subside, and it became apparent that Titus Oates was a fraud and an imposter. At this point King Charles II put Ashley on trial for treason. Ashley escaped conviction but had to flee to Holland, where he died.

We now turn to a structural analysis of modern false-flag terrorism of the type that is commonly sponsored by factions or networks embedded in the secret intelligence agencies of modern states. This discussion draws on the work of Andreas von Bülow, Gerard Wisnewski, Gianfranco Sanguinetti, and on my own research on the Moro assassination, the Red Brigades, and Italian terrorism in general.

PATSIES

“I’m just a patsy.”
-- Lee Harvey Oswald, November 1963


Speaking of Guy Fawkes and his confreres, Father Gerard comments that “many intelligent men took for granted that in some way or other the actual conspirators were but the dupes and instruments of more crafty men than themselves, and in their mad enterprise played the game of ministers of State.” (Gerard 43) In this sense, Guy Fawkes may represent the archetype of the category of person known in modern intelligence parlance as the patsy.

The real authorship of state sponsored terrorism is to be successfully concealed, then a collection of scapegoats is the first ingredient required. These may be defined as the patsies, or alternatively as fall-guys, scapegoats, useful idiots, or dupes. It is necessary that they be of low mental ability and great gullibility, since their mission is to be part of false-flag groups which pretend to be working for a cause, such as the restoration of the caliphate, while in reality they are under the control of a private network inside the US government. It is vital for the terrorist controllers that the patsies not realize that this or that comrade in arms is actually a double agent, a provocateur working for the parallel CIA or some other complicit agency, or which more will be said later. The best candidates for the patsy role are psychotics, psychopaths, or sociopaths. They may be fanatics bursting with criminal energy and criminal intent, or they may be pathetic ideologues and naifs. Frequently they are also misfits, bunglers, and generally maladroit in what they undertake.

According to research sponsored in 1999 by the Library of Congress, in a 1972 study “psychologist B.J. Berkowitz described six psychological types who would be most likely to threaten or try to use WMD: paranoids, paranoid schizophrenics, borderline mental defectives, schizophrenic types, passive-aggressive personality types, and sociopath personalities. He considered sociopaths the most likely actually to use WMD. Nuclear terrorism expert Jessica Stern disagreed. She believed that "Schizophrenics and sociopaths, for example, may want to commit acts of mass destruction, but they are less likely than others to succeed." She pointed out that large-scale dissemination of chemical, biological, or radiological agents requires a group effort, but that "Schizophrenics, in particular, often have difficulty functioning in groups ...." (Hudson)

Because the patsies are usually such low-grade subjects, they require comprehensive support of many types. They may need help in renting an apartment or in finding a cover job. They always seem to be getting in trouble with the police, and then it is necessary to see that they get out on bail as quickly as possible. If they are lonely, they may need specially trained sex operatives to comfort them or even to marry them (the KGB and the Stasi called their sex troops “The Swallows”). Above all they require constant financial assistance to be able to travel around the world, as they so frequently seem to be able to do despite the fact that they are most often without any visible means of support. The most important things about patsies are that they are almost always physically, mentally and technically unable to carry out the crimes of which they are accused. This is a matter of insufficient ability and capability, and not of the lack of criminal intent, which is often abundant.

Patsies can then be used in many combinations. They can be merged together in false flag terror operations. These organizations will assume a distinct ideological or religious coloration and will advertise it, and that will become the key to the process of creating or reinforcing the enemy image desired by the terrorist controllers after the terrorist action has been successfully carried out. That coloration or affiliation will constitute the false flag, and it will be assiduously prepared. Here some of the members may be witting; these are the double agents and police informers. Other components are not witting, at least about the most important things. What patsies can accomplish by themselves is often supplemented by the actions of doubles, double agents, and informers, who do things for them when they can not show up. Sometimes patsies are sent to make contact with other groups, a process known as sheep-dipping. If a terrorist controller wants to implicate the Podunk Democratic Party in terrorism, then he sends a patsy to sign up with them and attend their meetings before the terrorist act is carried out. That gives the police a good reason to raid the Podunk Democratic Party headquarters.

Thus, in 1992 and 1993, the New York City FBI informant and agent provocateur Emad Salem repeatedly tried to implicate the Sudanese UN Mission in his own "Islamic terror cell" World Trade Center bomb plot conspiracy. Here we see how a false flag terror cell sheep-dips its dupes into contact with a target, which then becomes the object of police investigation, and possibly later of military attack.

In January 2002, the Supreme Court of Germany had to call off all proceedings in the ongoing constitutional trial concerning the Schroeder government’s attempt to ban the extreme right-wing or reputedly neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany because it turned out that the government's chief witness, a member of the national NPD party executive, had worked as an informant for the German Constitutional Protection Agency (Verfassungsschutz, comparable to the FBI), for many years. The Court ruled that the trial could not go forward until this issue was clarified.

Osama Bin Laden, the rich misfit, has often been described in terms which seem to suit him for this category. A CIA agent named Beardman has asserted that Osama Bin Laden, during the entire time that he was organizing his mujaheddin fighters to do battle with the Soviets in Afghanistan, never realized that the operation was being financed and directed by the CIA. The CIA's Beardman confirmed, in this regard, that Osama Bin Laden was not aware of the role he was playing on behalf of Washington. In the words of Bin Laden (quoted by Beardman): "neither I, nor my brothers saw evidence of American help." Bin Laden thus may also qualify as a clueless dupe.

The patsies ultimately have three vital functions. The first is that they have to be noticed. They must attract lots and lots of attention. They may issue raving statements on videotape, or doubles can be used to issue these statements for them if they are not up to it. They need to get into fights with passersby, as Mohammed Atta is said to have done concerning a parking space at the airport in Maine early in the morning on September 11. Even if they are presumed dead they must remain prominent, as in the case of Atta’s passport, which is alleged by the FBI to have survived the fiery collapse of the World Trade Center towers to be found undamaged and unsinged on a nearby street. Even when presumed dead they must be eloquent about themselves and their activities, as they accused 9/11 hijackers when they left behind a copy of the Koran, airline schedules, terrorist literature and videotapes, and Atta’s crudely forged last will and testament in a car and in luggage.

Despite the need to be noticed as much as possible, the patsies have to stay out of jail. If they are all in jail, the planned terror action cannot take place. This is not because the patsies are needed to carry it out, but rather because they must be on hand in order to be blamed for it, whether they are on the scene or far away. If the patsies are in jail, they cannot be scapegoated. Therefore a lawyer and bail money must be provided, or a complicit judge told to release the defendant. Immigration authorities and Customs must be told to look the other way. To keep the patsies out of jail so they can serve their vital purpose is the job of the moles, as will soon be shown.

Finally, if all else goes well, it is the destiny of the patsies to take the blame for the terror action once it has happened. At this point the moles in the government apparatus, who had earlier been the patsies’ greatest friends and protectors, become their most implacable enemies. The patsies must be hunted down and, preferably, liquidated on the spot, as the British Special Air Services anti-terrorist force always prefers to do, with a maximum of firepower. Their faces and stories will be demonized as the latest manifestation of absolute evil. The nationality, philosophy, or religion which the media portray them as representing will become the target of raving vilification, arrest, economic sanctions, cruise missile retaliation, and armed invasion, as the case may be.

A pathetic case in point is Richard Reid, the shoe bomber of December 2001. Shortly after Reid was arrested for having attempted to blow up the transatlantic airliner in which he was traveling with the help of explosives planted in the soles of his shoes, sources in the Washington DC mosque said that they had acquired the following profile of Reid from Dr. Abdul Haqq Baker of Brixton mosque in London. According to Baker and others from Brixton, Richard Reid could only be described as mentally deficient. "He was not someone who would be medically classified as mentally retarded," the source reported, "but he was definitely slow." He could not have hatched any kind of terror attack on his own, and could not have even put the shoe bombs on his own feet without help, the source had been told by officials of the Brixton Mosque. Yet, according to news accounts, Reid spent time in Iran three or four years before his terror attempt, and traveled to Tel Aviv from Heathrow Airport near London in the summer of 2001. He was thoroughly frisked before being allowed on to the El Al flight, and was forced to sit next to a sky marshal at the back of the plane. Israeli officials claimed to know nothing about what Reid was doing in Israel. From Israel, Reid went to Egypt, and then to Turkey, before returning to London Heathrow. Reid had been sleeping on the floor at the Brixton Mosque, had no visible means of support, etc. Reid's father, who was also a convert to Islam, and encouraged his son to do the same, told the American press that his son must have been brainwashed by radical Islamists to get him to undertake the suicide attack. (New York Times and Washington Post, December 29, 2001)

Another case may well be that of Jose Padilla, the man who was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and who has been designated as an enemy combatant by Attorney General Ashcroft and held incommunicado without charges or a lawyer for months. Although he may only be a walk-on in Ashcroft’s larger spectacle, what kind of an Islamic fighter was Padilla supposed to be? According to Maureen Dowd, this “plotter was a Chicago street punk named Jose Padilla, a hothead with a long criminal record who was thrown in jail in Florida for shooting at a motorist in a road-rage incident. The mind games of fear begin with Abu Zubaydah, the U.S. captive, one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants, who fingered Padilla.” (New York Times, June 12, 2002)

The most famous patsy is of course Lee Harvey Oswald, the archetype of the embittered, lonely misfit and drifter. But he was a misfit with a difference, one who was able to move from the Marine Corps to émigré status in the USSR, then back to Texas and New Orleans as an activist for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Oswald was someone who seemed to go out of his way to be abrasive and to attract attention. He handed out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and got involved in altercations with anti-Castro Cubans. He appeared in a radio debate, and was interviewed on television. He took a surprise trip to Mexico City to visit the Soviet Embassy there. He did everything possible to get noticed. Indeed, he got noticed so much that at various time there may have been two or even three Oswald doubles running around, something that would have required the resources of a major intelligence organization like the CIA or the FBI. But Oswald was also unable to manage the petty details of his own everyday life without the assistance of others, notably of the European aristocrat Georges de Morenschildt, a patrician who had George H.W. Bush’s name and phone number in his address book. Oswald was most likely an FBI informant, working for Special Agent Guy Bannister in New Orleans. But this did not protect him from being fingered as the assassin, nor did it save him from being silenced by Jack Ruby before he could ever testify in his own defense. The problem with Oswald, as with so many patsies, is that he was neither physically nor technically capable of carrying out the crime which has been ascribed to him: using his antiquated Italian 1917 Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with its crude little telescopic sight, it is clear that Oswald could never have fired with sufficient speed and accuracy the four or five shots (at minimum) that were actually heard on Dealey Plaza that day, and which are necessary to account for the number of wounds suffered by President Kennedy and Governor Connally, plus other shots that missed their target. This question of physical impossibility is often the most obvious weak point of the official explanations of terrorist actions. In the Kennedy assassination, it was expressly to address the problem of the physical impossibility of Oswald’s having acted as a lone assassin that Arlen Spector, part of the staff of the Warren Commission, invented his magic bullet theory. Spector asserted that the same slug had caused seven wounds: an entry wound in Kennedy’s back, an exit wound at the base of his throat, then an entry wound in Connally’s back, an exit wound in Connally’s chest, an entry wound in Connally’s wrist, and exit wound from the other side of Connally’s wrist, and finally an entry wound in Connally’s leg. At the end of all this, the bullet was supposedly found in virtually pristine condition lying in a stretcher at Parkland Hospital after Kennedy had died. Even after these incredible contortions, requiring that the same bullet change course in mid-air at least twice, the problem of physical impossibility had not been solved, since there were still four or five shots on the audio tape which had recorded the sounds of the assassination through the open microphone of a Dallas police officer’s radio. It was this insuperable problem which led the House Assassinations Committee of 1978 to rule that Kennedy’s death was the result of a probable conspiracy, and not simply of the actions of a deranged lone assassin.

As Sanguinetti sums up, “the outrages that are accomplished directly by the intelligence agencies and secret services of the State are not usually claimed by anybody, but are each time imputed or attributed to some convenient ‘culprit,’ like Pinelli or Valpreda. Experience has proved that this is the weakest point of such terrorism, and that which determines the extreme fragility of it in the political usage that certain forces want to make of it. It is starting from the results of the same experience that the strategists of secret services of the State seek, from this point on, to lend a greater credibility, or at least a lesser inverisimilitude to their own work …by claiming them directly through such-and-such initials of a ghostly group….” (Sanguinetti 2)
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:03 am

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

THE PATSY MILIEU

You give yourself for an agent provocateur. The proper business of an agent provocateur is to provoke.
-- Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907).


The patsies inhabit a scene of their own, a place on the outskirts of society where terrorists, naïve or romantic dupes, provocateurs, sting operatives, double agents, Dopplegänger and informers congregate. There was something of this nature among southern European fascist extremists in Madrid, Athens, and Rome during the 1960s and 1970s; the denizens of this milieu played their parts in the “black terrorism” of those years. There was a parallel milieu of anarchists, Maoists, left communists, Trotskyists, and anarchosyndicalists in many cities of Europe during that same time frame. In the 1980s and 1990s, a patsy milieu developed among right-wing militia activists and paramilitaries in the great plains and upper Midwest of America. During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, a patsy milieu has grown up not just in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia, but also in western Europe and the United States. In fact, the classic patsy milieu of the 1990s was in London.

The patsy milieu has been skillfully evoked by Joseph Conrad in his fascinating novel, The Secret Agent (1907). Here we have the agent provocateur Verloc meeting with his confreres of the International Red Committee; Verloc is in the pay of the Russian Embassy, among others, and attempts to organize a bombing of the prime meridian at Greenwich Observatory. The Russian Embassy wants the attentat in order to motivate the international Milan conference to crack down on nihilists, revolutionaries, and bomb- throwers all over Europe. A movie which accurately depicts the world of patsies, moles, and expert professionals is The Package, written by John Bishop, starring Gene Hackman and Tommy Lee Jones. During the Gorbachev era, a group of US and Soviet generals opposed to disarmament decide to sabotage an upcoming treaty by assassinating Gorbachev during a visit to Chicago. Tommy Lee Jones is the expert professional who operates in complete anonymity – he is smuggled into the US under a fake identity. There is also a pathetic patsy, recruited by one of the mole generals from a military prison and sent to Chicago to attract attention as a neo-Nazi.

MOLES

…jokes were actually made that the key FBIHQ personnel had to be spies or moles, like Robert Hanssen, who were actually working for Osama Bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis' effort.
-- Colleen Rowley to FBI Director Robert Mueller


As has already been suggested, the patsies are incapable of operating on their own for any length of time, and certainly do not have the ability to carry out the vast crimes that are attributed to them. The assistance which the patsies require in order to carry out their roles come from another sub- system, of the terrorist enterprise, the moles. The most important category of moles is constituted by high-level government officials and managers who are not loyal to the agencies they work for, and certainly not to the Constitution they are sworn to serve, but rather operate as members of a private network which has infiltrated the government and ensconced itself in it, sometimes over a very long time. In fact, the US government as it exists today is the result of many generations of penetration by moles, with the moles of each generation assisting the careers of the succeeding generation, and so forth, until loyalty to the Constitution is the exception rather than the rule.

Foreign moles have been able successfully to operate inside the US government for long periods. Aldrich Ames worked as a mole for the Soviets inside the CIA for many years. The same goes for Soviet mole Robert Hanssen of the FBI, who was discovered in the spring of 2000. In 1997 the press carried a news item about an Israeli mole code-named Mega, allegedly controlled by Danny Yatom, head of the Mossad, who was allegedly ensconced in the Clinton White House. (Washington Post, May 7, 1997) But here we are not primarily concerned with outright foreign moles, but rather with moles whose loyalty goes to networks based on religion, finance, or other associations based primarily in the US, although here foreign influence certainly cannot be ruled out. Even so, the fact that high-level moles were able to operate for so long suggests a certain nonchalance about the presence of moles in the US government bureaucracy; certainly a mole working for a US-based subversive network would have an easier time in operating than one working for the USSR.

So far, the classic mole suspect of 9/11 according to most published accounts is Dave Frasca, the head of the radical Islamic fundamentalist bureau of the FBI, the point at which the Phoenix memorandum and the Minnesota requests to search Zacharias Moussawi’s laptop evidently converged, only to be ignored, sabotaged, and sanctioned. As Time magazine commented:

…in its most searching passage, Rowley's letter lays out the case that the FBI made fateful miscalculations by failing to see a possible connection between the Minneapolis investigation of flight student Moussaoui and the hunch of Phoenix agent Kenneth Williams — posited in a report to HQ two months earlier — that al-Qaeda operatives were attending U.S. flight schools. Law-enforcement and congressional sources told Time that both reports landed on the desk of Dave Frasca, the head of the FBI's radical- fundamentalist unit. The Phoenix memo was buried; the Moussaoui warrant request was denied. (Time, May 27, 2002)


Other accounts differ as to the identity of the main blocker of the Phoenix memorandum and the Minneapolis proposals. According to former CIA agent Ray McGovern, the official who sat on this material was Spike Owen, who nevertheless “received a $20,000 cash award from the administration for his duties in safeguarding the American people.” (Washington Post, July 26, 2004) Was this a mole?

The Phoenix memorandum, written by Kenneth Williams, an agent in Phoenix, was sent to FBI headquarters as an electronic computer message on July 10. It was reviewed by midlevel supervisors, who headed the bureau’s Bin Laden and Islamic extremist counterterrorism units. The Phoenix memorandum urged FBI headquarters to investigate Middle Eastern men enrolled in American flight schools, and cited Bin Laden by name, and suggested that the men might be training for terror operations against the United States. (New York Times, May 15, 2002)

Frasca is not mentioned once in the final report of the Kean-Hamilton commission, and whistle- blower Colleen Rowley, despite having been featured on the cover of Time as person of the year, never testified in public, and gets only one fleeting mention of her interview with the 9/11 commission in footnote 94, page 557, towards the back of the book.

Rowley’s memo to FBI Director Mueller has been published, and is worth examining at length. The Supervisory Special Agent to whom she repeatedly refers is once again presumably David Frasca. Rowley reports:

The Minneapolis agents who responded to the call about Moussaoui's flight training identified him as a terrorist threat from a very early point. The decision to take him into custody on August 15, 2001, on the INS "overstay" charge was a deliberate one to counter that threat and was based on the agents' reasonable suspicions. While it can be said that Moussaoui's overstay status was fortuitous, because it allowed for him to be taken into immediate custody and prevented him from receiving any more flight training, it was certainly not something the INS coincidentally undertook of their own volition. I base this on the conversation I had when the agents called me at home late on the evening Moussaoui was taken into custody to confer and ask for legal advice about their next course of action. The INS agent was assigned to the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force and was therefore working in tandem with FBI agents. To say then, as has been iterated numerous times, that probable cause did not exist until after the disastrous event occurred, is really to acknowledge that the missing piece of probable cause was only the FBI's (FBIHQ's) failure to appreciate that such an event could occur.

Even without knowledge of the Phoenix communication (and any number of other additional intelligence communications that FBIHQ personnel were privy to in their central coordination roles), the Minneapolis agents appreciated the risk. So I think it's very hard for the FBI to offer the "20- 20 hindsight" justification for its failure to act! Also intertwined with my reluctance in this case to accept the "20-20 hindsight" rationale is first- hand knowledge that I have of statements made on September 11th, after the first attacks on the World Trade Center had already occurred, made telephonically by the FBI Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) who was the one most involved in the Moussaoui matter and who, up to that point, seemed to have been consistently, almost deliberately thwarting the Minneapolis FBI agents' efforts…. Even after the attacks had begun, the SSA in question was still attempting to block the search of Moussaoui's computer, characterizing the World Trade Center attacks as a mere coincidence with Minneapolis' prior suspicions about Moussaoui.

The fact is that key FBIHQ personnel whose job it was to assist and coordinate with field division agents on terrorism investigations and the obtaining and use of FISA searches (and who theoretically were privy to many more sources of intelligence information than field division agents), continued to, almost inexplicably, throw up roadblocks and undermine Minneapolis' by-now desperate efforts to obtain a FISA search warrant, long after the French intelligence service provided its information and probable cause became clear. HQ personnel brought up almost ridiculous questions in their apparent efforts to undermine the probable cause. In all of their conversations and correspondence, HQ personnel never disclosed to the Minneapolis agents that the Phoenix Division had, only approximately three weeks earlier, warned of Al Qaeda operatives in flight schools seeking flight training for terrorist purposes! Nor did FBIHQ personnel do much to disseminate the information about Moussaoui to other appropriate intelligence/law enforcement authorities. When, in a desperate 11th hour measure to bypass the FBIHQ roadblock, the Minneapolis Division undertook to directly notify the CIA's Counter Terrorist Center (CTC), FBIHQ personnel actually chastised the Minneapolis agents for making the direct notification without their approval!

Eventually on August 28, 2001, after a series of e-mails between Minneapolis and FBIHQ, which suggest that the FBIHQ SSA deliberately further undercut the FISA effort by not adding the further intelligence information which he had promised to add that supported Moussaoui's foreign power connection and making several changes in the wording of the information that had been provided by the Minneapolis Agent, the Minneapolis agents were notified that the NSLU Unit Chief did not think there was sufficient evidence of Moussaoui's connection to a foreign power. Minneapolis personnel are, to this date, unaware of the specifics of the verbal presentations by the FBIHQ SSA to NSLU or whether anyone in NSLU ever was afforded the opportunity to actually read for him/herself all of the information on Moussaoui that had been gathered by the Minneapolis Division and the French intelligence service. Obviously verbal presentations are far more susceptible to mis- characterization and error. The e-mail communications between Minneapolis and FBIHQ, however, speak for themselves and there are far better witnesses than me who can provide their first hand knowledge of these events characterized in one Minneapolis agent's e-mail as FBIHQ is "setting this up for failure." My only comment is that the process of allowing the FBI supervisors to make changes in affidavits is itself fundamentally wrong, just as, in the follow-up to FBI Laboratory Whistleblower Frederic Whitehurst's allegations, this process was revealed to be wrong in the context of writing up laboratory results. With the Whitehurst allegations, this process of allowing supervisors to re-write portions of laboratory reports, was found to provide opportunities for over-zealous supervisors to skew the results in favor of the prosecution. In the Moussaoui case, it was the opposite -- the process allowed the Headquarters Supervisor to downplay the significance of the information thus far collected in order to get out of the work of having to see the FISA application through or possibly to avoid taking what he may have perceived as an unnecessary career risk. I understand that the failures of the FBIHQ personnel involved in the Moussa matter are also being officially excused because they were too busy with other investigations, the Cole bombing and other important terrorism matters, but the Supervisor's taking of the time to read each word of the information submitted by Minneapolis and then substitute his own choice of wording belies to some extent the notion that he was too busy.


To sum up her frustration, Rowley wrote: “I know I shouldn’t be flippant about this, but jokes were actually made that the key FBIHQ personnel had to be spies or moles, like Robert Hansen [sic], who were actually working for Osama Bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis’ effort.” These lines speak for themselves. Evidently Frasca was not alone, since he was able to stay on the job with impunity even after 9/11, and even received a promotion. Rowley stresses the lack of any accountability whatsoever in the FBI’s internal process, which seems to be made to order for facilitating the unhampered operations of moles.

Although the last thing the FBI or the country needs now is a witch hunt, I do find it odd that (to my knowledge) no inquiry whatsoever was launched of the relevant FBIHQ personnel's actions a long time ago. Despite FBI leaders' full knowledge of all the items mentioned herein (and probably more that I'm unaware of), the SSA, his unit chief, and other involved HQ personnel were allowed to stay in their positions and, what's worse, occupy critical positions in the FBI's SIOC Command Center post September 11th. (The SSA in question actually received a promotion some months afterward!) It's true we all make mistakes and I'm not suggesting that HQ personnel in question ought to be burned at the stake, but, we all need to be held accountable for serious mistakes. (Time, May 27, 2002)


An internal FBI memo, which became public in May 2002, revealed that FBI agents had destroyed evidence gathered in an investigation involving Osama bin Laden's network after its e-mail wiretap system mistakenly captured information to which the agency was not entitled. This was supposedly because the FBI software being used, called Carnivore, not only picked up the e-mails of its target, ''but also picked up e-mails on non-covered targets,'' said the memo, which was written in March 2000 to agency headquarters in Washington. According to the memo, “The FBI technical person was apparently so upset that he destroyed all the e-mail take, including the take on'' the suspect. These events allegedly took place during an investigation in Denver in which the FBI's bin Laden unit was using the bureau's Carnivore system to conduct electronic surveillance of a suspect under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant. The memo was addressed to M.E. ''Spike'' Bowman, the FBI's associate general counsel for national security. Another mole?

The Justice Department's Office of Intelligence and Policy Review claimed to be furious after learning the evidence captured by the e-mail wiretap system was destroyed because of the glitch, the memo states. “To state that she was unhappy at ITOS (International Terrorism Operations Center) and the UBL (bin Laden) unit is an understatement,'' the memo stated, quoting a Justice official. This incident came to light in the course of a court battle over whether the Carnivore system was being used illegally by the FBI to scoop up emails that were not covered by a warrant. The main reform undertaken by the FBI in this matter would appear to have been to change the name of Carnivore to DCS- 1000. (D. Ian Hopper, “Memo: FBI Destroyed Evidence in Bin Laden Case After Glitch With E-mail Surveillance System,” Associated Press, Boston Globe, May 28, 2002)

Then there is the case of Kevin Delaney, an official of the Federal Aviation Administration. During the day of 9/11, supervisors had asked air traffic controllers and other officials to talk about their experiences, and had taped these statements. It later came to light that this evidence had been subsequently destroyed by an FAA official named Kevin Delaney. Press reports in the spring of 2004 confirmed that Delaney had burned the tapes. Was he a mole? The 9/11 commission was not interested in this highly significant and highly indicative matter, and did not bother to include Delaney’s name in its final report. How many other Kevin Delaneys still infest the federal bureaucracy may never be known with precision. But, according to press accounts, federal agency records with possible bearing on 9/11 were “routinely destroyed” between September 11, 2001 and the launching of the 9/11 commission in the spring of 2003. (New York Times, May 6, 2004)

Another FBI whistle-blower was Robert Wright, whose case was taken up by David Schippers, the lawyer who prosecuted the impeachment of Bill Clinton before the House of Representatives, and later by Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch. According to Klayman, Wright had been sounding an alarm within the FBI for years before 9/11 about terrorists within the United States. Rather than act on Wright's warnings, the FBI deflected and obstructed his efforts to curtail dangerous movements by agents of Hamas and Hezbollah. Wright's work within the FBI was geared towards thwarting money- laundering activities by these agents, and after going public he claimed that his efforts were stymied because of an official desire to coddle pro-Palestinian groups to protect the reputation of Yasser Arafat. But Wright’s expertise does not reach up that high; all he knew was what he saw, and the explanations he cites are hearsay or speculation. The important thing is the phenomenon. In the course of Wright’s probing, a Saudi businessman named Yasin Kadi had become implicated in the terrorism funding. Wright was careful to note that, one month after the 9/11 attacks, Kadi was named by the Federal government as a financial supporter of Osama bin Laden. Wright's frustration about the FBI's inaction regarding his warnings led him to write a 500 page manuscript detailing the Bureau's anti-terrorism failings entitled “Fatal Betrayals of the Intelligence Mission.” At a press conference in May, 2002, Wright summed up: “My efforts have always been geared towards neutralizing the terrorist threats that focused on taking the lives of American citizens, in addition to harming the national and economic security of America. However, as a direct result of the incompetence, and at times intentional obstruction of justice by FBI management to prevent me from bringing terrorists to justice, Americans have unknowingly been exposed to potential terrorist attacks for years." He went on to state, "Knowing what I know, I can confidently say that until the investigative responsibilities for terrorism are removed from the FBI, I will not feel safe.” (William Rivers Pitt, Truthout, May 31, 2002)

For analytical purposes, we must stress once again that these activities of reputed FBI moles all have to do with the key mole mission of preventing the patsies from being rounded up and put out of action. The patsies, we recall, are not the actual authors of the crime, but their presence as the scapegoats is indispensable to the entire operation. And if the patsies are to operate, their support network, including funding, must operate undisturbed. Ironically, shutting down the patsies tends to shut down the operation, even though the patsies are not part of the operation itself. But they are needed for its propaganda exploitation. The question of the actual authors of the crime will be dealt with shortly.

But is there any hope that things may have gotten better after 9/11. Let us look for a moment at the FBI’s own in-house investigation of what went wrong. According to the Washington Post, the leader of this internal inquiry turns out to have been the official whose most important achievement in his previous career had been the stubborn obstruction of the inquiry into the Waco massacre by former Senator and current US UN Ambassador John Danforth. The FBI official in question was Thomas A. Kelley, the head of the team looking into what the FBI knew and didn't know prior to Sept. 11 for the JICI. Kelley had previously been the deputy general counsel of the FBI. In that capacity he obstructed Danforth’s investigation into the FBI’s role at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in the spring of 1993. A December 2000 internal FBI memo reported that Kelley “continued to thwart and obstruct” the Waco investigation to the point that Danforth was forced to send a team to search FBI headquarters for the documents he needed. The memo said that Kelley should have been investigated by the Office of Professional Responsibility for “unprofessional conduct, poor judgment, conflict of interest, hostile work environment and retaliation/reprisal” in connection with his role in the Waco investigation. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), in a letter to the leaders of JICI, expressed concern about Kelley's presence in the investigation, and noted that Kelley retired from the FBI before an OPR probe could get off the ground. Officials JICI said they were waiting for confidential memos and other documents relating to the allegations against Kelley before deciding how to proceed. Danforth himself, in an interview last year, faulted the FBI's “spirit of resistance” to outside scrutiny. He said getting the information he needed for his investigation “was like pulling teeth.” (Washington Post, June 22, 2002)

In the recent history of terrorism, we have been able to observe situations in which the moles inside the state apparatus and the terrorists in the field have become almost impossible to distinguish. In other words, the moles have gone out into the field in the guise of double agents and infiltrators. One such case involves the shadowy Greek terrorist group, November 19. This group advertises itself as a reaction to the US-backed fascist colonels’ coup in Greece in 1967. More recently, November 19 has inveighed in its communiqués against US imperialism, the capitalist class, the European Community, and Germany, which it has defined as the “Fourth Reich,” a slogan which smacks of the Thatcher-Ridley regime in Britain in 1989-90. It was the November 19 group which in December 1975 claimed responsibility for the assassination of Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens. This crime had been especially useful to the CIA, to its incoming chief, George H.W. Bush, and to the Ford administration in general, who had been on the defensive in intelligence matters for many months because of the aggressive investigations of the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House, which had unearthed much evidence of illegal and questionable activity by the US spy agencies. The Pike Committee had even issued a contempt of Congress citation against none other than Henry Kissinger, the strongman of the Ford regime. Columnists friendly to the CIA impudently blamed the death of Welch directly on the Church and Pike committees, although neither of them had ever mentioned Welch or Athens. (Tarpley 1992 300-301)

Over the years the November 19 organization, while carrying out some 40 armed attacks and assassinations, demonstrated a remarkable ability to escape capture, evading the most carefully prepared traps and ambushes. Gradually the awareness spread that November 19 somehow had access to information from the secret councils of the Greek anti-terror authorities. After four November 19 operatives escaped a police ambush in March 1992, the case broke open to some extent. The boss of the Greek anti-terror unit EKAM, Mihalis Mavroleas, was ousted from his job. It soon became evident that the investigators and the terrorists were in fact the same persons! The Greek Minister for Public Order and the national Chief of Police were obliged to come forward with the extremely embarrassing revelation that November 19 possessed a network of spies within the police. The EKAM, which had been founded in 1990 as the anti-terror corps d’elite, had allegedly been completely penetrated! About half of the anti-terror personnel were fired. But the Athens authorities were clearly doing their best at damage control. As damaging as their revelations were, they were not as damning as the obvious truth, which was that November 19 was in fact a wholly owned subsidiary of the Greek police and intelligence services, perhaps with ties to the CIA and to NATO intelligence. This impression is confirmed by persistent reports of the existence in Greece of a paramilitary formation founded some decades back and supposedly dedicated to the task of organizing guerilla warfare against Soviet occupying forces in case Greece were conquered in the course of a some future war. This unit would thus fit the logic of the stay-behind organization, which has been amply documented in the case of Italy in the case of Gladio, which we describe below. (Wisnewski 1994 395-400)

Something quite similar has been established in regard to the Italian Red Brigades. In 1982 an important official of the Italian Justice Ministry in Rome, Giovanni Senzani, was arrested on the charge of being the head of the Red Brigades in the Naples area. Senzani had been the object of a campaign in the Rome press about the need to discover the identity of “la talpa,” the mole in the state bureaucracy. Senzani was in close relations to SISMI, the Italian military intelligence service, an agency which had been implicated in the Milan bomb of 1969 and other terrorist atrocities. This would indicate that at least part of the Red Brigades structure was directed from inside the government.

The Red Brigades had been created in the late 1960s at the Sociology Department of the University of Trento in northern Italy. The original members had displayed sociopathic symptoms, and they had gradually been eliminated by arrests and shootouts with the police. The Italian investigating judge Ferdinando Imposimato asserted in 1982 that the Red Brigades had been infiltrated by the Israeli Mossad no later than 1978. Based on testimony from two jailed former members of the Red Brigades, Imposimato reported that the Mossad had provided the Italian terrorists with weapons, money, and information. As the original members suffered attrition, they were replaced by new recruits. One of these was Mario Moretti, reputedly the leader of the Red Brigades during the Moro kidnapping. More senior members complained from their jail cells that Moretti failed to pass on warnings of coming police raids, and sabotaged attempted jail breaks. Moretti advocated a policy of constantly escalating violence, and was widely considered an agent provocateur of the CIA.

In these cases, it is not the terrorist organization which has infiltrated the state apparatus, but the state apparatus which finds it convenient to practice a virtual interchangeability with top members of the state apparatus. Sanguinetti notes that, in certain safe houses or lairs of the Red Brigades, there was found “an abundance of ultra-confidential material issuing from police headquarters, central police stations and even from ministries. In view of such eloquent facts, spectacular information [i.e. new broadcasts] always claimed to explain them by emphasizing the ultra-efficient organization of the terrible Red Brigades, and by adding, in order to enhance this wonderful godsend for advertising, the fact that these clandestine militants, so hunted-down but so tentacular, have infiltrated everywhere, even ministries and central police stations.” This, as we will see, is like some 9/11 researchers who conclude that, since the attacks took place on a day when so many special exercises were taking place, Al Qaeda must have infiltrated the Pentagon in order to know exactly when to strike. Naturally Sanguinetti cannot entertain such nonsense. His conclusion: “It is not the Red Brigades who have infiltrated the central police stations and ministries, but agents of the State, issuing from the central police stations and ministries, who have infiltrated the Red Brigades by design, and not only their top leadership, to be sure.” (Sanguinetti 21)

SIBEL EDMONDS: INSIDE THE FBI MOLE HILL

A similar and highly significant case has come to the surface in connection with 9/11. This involves Sibel Edmonds, who worked as a translator for the FBI’s Washington field office. Edmonds’ story may give some the impression that the FBI has been penetrated by some subversive Middle East organization, but a careful reading suggests the reverse. Edmonds became known to the public as a whistle blower protesting very strange activities in her FBI work place. As a result, she was accused of having breached FBI security, and was fired. The heart of Edmonds’s allegation is that the FBI office where she worked was staffed by members of the very same Middle Eastern group whose wiretapped conversations the office was working to translate. The FBI, of course, denied everything. But Edmonds recounts that when she told Dennis Saccher, a special agent in the Washington field office who was conducting the surveillance, about the co-worker's actions, Saccher had replied, "It looks like espionage to me." But Saccher refused to comment for the press. Edmonds was fired in March 2002 after she reported her concerns. Government officials said the FBI fired her because her “disruptiveness” hurt her on-the-job “performance.” Edmonds said she believes she was fired in retaliation for reporting on her co-worker.

Edmonds began working at the FBI in late September 2001. She later reported that she had become particularly alarmed when she discovered that a recently hired FBI translator was going around saying that she belonged to precisely the same Middle Eastern organization whose taped conversations she had been translating for FBI counterintelligence agents. FBI officials did everything that they could to prevent the name of the target group from being revealed to the public, allegedly for national security reasons. This case became public when a Washington Post reporter discovered Edmonds's name in her whistle-blowing letters to federal and congressional officials and approached her for an interview. Edmonds said that on several occasions, her fellow translator had tried to recruit her to join the targeted foreign group. “This person told us she worked for our target organization,” Edmonds said in an interview. “These are the people we are targeting, monitoring.” Of course, what all this means is that the target organization was also controlled by the FBI, or was itself part of the FBI – not that the FBI had been infiltrated.

The other translator was an unidentified 33-year-old U.S. citizen whose native country is home to the target group. This is also the country were Edmonds was born, and is probably Turkey or Iran. Both Edmonds and the other translator are U.S. citizens. The other woman, who is still working under contract for the FBI's Washington field office, refused to comment. Edmonds also reported that the woman and her husband, a U.S. military officer, suggested that Edmonds become a member of their group during a hastily arranged visit to Edmonds's Northern Virginia home on a Sunday morning in December 2001. “He said, ‘Are you a member of the particular organization?’’ Edmonds recalled the woman's husband saying. The military officer went on to add: “It's a very good place to be a member. There are a lot of advantages of being with this organization and doing things together and one of the greatest things about it is you can have an early, unexpected retirement. And you will be totally set if you go to that specific country.” Edmonds also reported that the military officer assured her that she would easily be admitted to the group, especially if she said she worked for the FBI. Later, Edmonds said, the same woman approached her with a list dividing up individuals whose phone lines were being secretly tapped: Under the plan, the woman would translate conversations of her fellow members of the target organization, and Edmonds would handle other phone calls. Edmonds said she refused and that the woman told her that her lack of cooperation could put her family in danger.

Edmonds also brought her concerns to her supervisor and other FBI officials in the Washington field office. When no action was taken, she also reported to the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility, then to Justice's inspector general. “Investigations are being compromised,” Edmonds wrote to the inspector general's office in March 2002. “Incorrect or misleading translations are being sent to agents in the field. Translations are being blocked and circumvented.” Edmonds had also written to Dale Watson, the bureau's counterterrorism chief. Her case has been referred to Justice's Office of the Inspector General. (Washington Post, June 19, 2002) But in the meantime, the Ashcroft Justice Department has taken the extraordinary step of declaring the Edmonds case a state secret, meaning that literally everything is classified. Sibel Edmonds was interviewed by the 9/11 commission, and makes it into the commission report just once, in footnote 25, page 490, in the course of a discussion about how important it is to have good translators.

But the substance of her case goes completely unreported. This is not surprising, since the entire case has been classified by Ashcroft as a state secret.

After the 9/11 commission had issued its report, Edmonds sent an open letter to Kean and Hamilton pointing out that much of the evidence she had delivered to the commission had simply been ignored. She also escalated her critique by naming the names of FBI supervisors, some of whom qualify for our purposes here as potential moles. Edmonds’ letter provides another rare glimpse at how moles operate inside intelligence agencies to sabotage law enforcement and make sure that patsies are not rounded up or effective warnings given until it is too late.

Melek Can Dickerson, a Turkish translator, was hired by the FBI after September 11, and was placed in charge of translating the most sensitive information related to terrorists and criminals under the Bureau's investigation. Melek Can Dickerson was granted Top Secret Clearance, which can be granted only after conducting a thorough background investigation. Melek Can Dickerson used to work for semi-legit organizations that were the FBI's targets of investigation. Melek Can Dickerson had on going relationships with two individuals who were the FBI's targets of investigation. For months Melek Can Dickerson blocked all-important information related to these semi-legit organizations and the individuals she and her husband associated with. She stamped hundreds, if not thousands, of documents related to these targets as 'Not Pertinent.' Melek Can Dickerson attempted to prevent others from translating these documents important to the FBI's investigations and our fight against terrorism. Melek Can Dickerson, with the assistance of her direct supervisor, Mike Feghali, took hundreds of pages of top-secret sensitive intelligence documents outside the FBI to unknown recipients. Melek Can Dickerson, with the assistance of her direct supervisor, forged signatures on top-secret documents related to certain 9/11 detainees. After all these incidents were confirmed and reported to FBI management, Melek Can Dickerson was allowed to remain in her position, to continue the translation of sensitive intelligence received by the FBI, and to maintain her Top Secret Clearance. Apparently bureaucratic mid-level FBI management and administrators decided that it would not look good for the Bureau if this security breach and espionage case was investigated and made public, especially after going through Robert Hanssen's case (FBI spy scandal). This case (Melek Can Dickerson) was confirmed by the Senate Judiciary Committee….


Here we have a serious allegation of serious federal crimes, far worse than Sandy Berger stuffing some old documents into his pants at the National Archives. It also raises the question: is Mike Feghali a conscious, witting mole, or merely an incompetent? Given the chaos inside the FBI, it is sometimes hard to tell. Edmonds also shows that there is no effective discipline or accountability inside the FBI molehill:

Today, more than two years since the Dickerson incident was reported to the FBI, and more than two years since this information was confirmed by the United States Congress and reported by the press, these administrators in charge of FBI personnel security and language departments in the FBI remain in their positions and in charge of translation quality and translation departments' security. Melek Can Dickerson and several FBI targets of investigation hastily left the United States in 2002, and the case still remains uninvestigated criminally. Not only does the supervisor facilitating these criminal conducts remain in a supervisory position, he has been promoted to supervising Arabic language units of the FBI's Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence investigations.


Edmonds also revealed a specific pre-9/11 warning on patsy activities which was simply ignored by the FBI, and then ignored again by the 9/11 commission:

Over three years ago, more than four months prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks, in April 2001, a long-term FBI informant/asset who had been providing the bureau with information since 1990, provided two FBI agents and a translator with specific information regarding a terrorist attack being planned by Osama Bin Laden. This asset/informant was previously a high-level intelligence officer in Iran in charge of intelligence from Afghanistan. Through his contacts in Afghanistan he received information that: 1) Osama Bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack in the United States targeting 4-5 major cities, 2) the attack was going to involve airplanes, 3) some of the individuals in charge of carrying out this attack were already in place in the United States, 4) the attack was going to be carried out soon, in a few months. The agents who received this information reported it to their superior, Special Agent in Charge of Counterterrorism, Thomas Frields, at the FBI Washington Field Office, by filing 302 forms, and the translator translated and documented this information. No action was taken by the Special Agent in Charge, and after 9/11 the agents and the translators were told to ‘keep quiet’ regarding this issue. The translator who was present during the session with the FBI informant, Mr. Behrooz Sarshar, reported this incident to Director Mueller in writing, and later to the Department of Justice Inspector General. The press reported this incident, and in fact the report in the Chicago Tribune on July 21, 2004 stated that FBI officials had confirmed that this information was received in April 2001, and further, the Chicago Tribune quoted an aide to Director Mueller that he (Mueller) was surprised that the Commission never raised this particular issue with him during the hearing.


Was Frields a mole? This is the kind of question the 9/11 commission should have asked, but which it always ducked. Edmonds goes on to mock the clichés about connecting the dots and sharing intelligence which are the stock in trade of the controlled corporate media. She points out that the Phoenix memo, the Minneapolis alarms, and the Sarshar material all converged in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington DC. The FBI had all that it needed to know that a large operation was afoot, which it could have disrupted by rolling up parts of the patsy network. But the FBI did nothing, and the 9/11 commission dropped the ball here as well, as Edmonds stresses:

All this information went to the same place: FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, and the FBI Washington Field Office, in Washington DC. Yet, your report claims that not having a central place where all intelligence could be gathered as one of the main factors in our intelligence failure. Why did your report choose to exclude the information regarding the Iranian asset and Behrooz Sarshar from its timeline of missed opportunities? Why was this significant incident not mentioned; despite the public confirmation by the FBI, witnesses provided to your investigators, and briefings you received directly? Why did you surprise even Director Mueller by refraining from asking him questions regarding this significant incident and lapse during your hearing (Please remember that you ran out of questions during your hearings with Director Mueller and AG John Ashcroft, so please do not cite a 'time limit' excuse)?


Mike Feghali appears in Edmonds’ account as a consummate bureaucratic bungler and dissembler. But the question stubbornly arises: was he a mole as well? And what about the bureaucrats who promoted him? Here Feghali is sabotaging translations requested by field agents:

In October 2001, approximately one month after the September 11 attack, an agent from a (city name omitted) field office, re-sent a certain document to the FBI Washington Field Office, so that it could be re- translated. This Special Agent, in light of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, rightfully believed that, considering his target of investigation (the suspect under surveillance), and the issues involved, the original translation might have missed certain information that could prove to be valuable in the investigation of terrorist activities. After this document was received by the FBI Washington Field Office and re-translated verbatim, the field agent's hunch appeared to be correct. The new translation revealed certain information regarding blueprints, pictures, and building material for skyscrapers being sent overseas. It also revealed certain illegal activities in obtaining visas from certain embassies in the Middle East, through network contacts and bribery. However, after the re-translation was completed and the new significant information was revealed, the unit supervisor in charge of certain Middle Eastern languages, Mike Feghali, decided NOT to send the re-translated information to the Special Agent who had requested it. Instead, this supervisor decided to send this agent a note stating that the translation was reviewed and that the original translation was accurate. This supervisor stated that sending the accurate translation would hurt the original translator and would cause problems for the FBI language department. The FBI agent requesting the re-translation never received the accurate translation of that document. (Sibel Edmonds, Letter to Thomas Kean, August 1, 2004)


Before we leave the moles, we must make one further important methodological point. Before the terrorist action occurs, the moles appear as embedded in a government bureaucracy which is resisting the new course which they wish to impose. After the fact, providing that the terrorist action has gone off successfully, the entire government seems to be made up exclusively of moles. Now the moles no longer appear isolated. In fact, the entire government is speaking the language which before the terror attack seemed to be the factional distinction of the moles, to the extent that they said anything. The government bureaucracy can be thought of as a gigantic freight train. With the successful terrorist act, a switch is turned, and the entire train goes rumbling in a new direction. The transformation achieved by a successful act of spectacular terrorism goes beyond what can be achieved by mere directives emanating from the office of the president or some cabinet secretary. Public opinion is shocked and stunned; the Congress is stampeded; the entire bureaucracy senses that the terrorist controllers have proven that it is they who are the strongest. After all, in Byzantine and neocon theory, law is an act of the will of the stronger over the weaker. The neocons regard a successful act of force as a valid act of legislation in that sense. The bureaucracy therefore inclines to the side of the plotters.

Once the new policy has been institutionalized, every bureaucrat will attempt to defend it as a matter of self-preservation. Bureaucratic inertia will now adapt itself to the new party line. This is why, in retrospect, it looks as if the entire government is composed of nothing but moles. But this impression is misleading. It is not feasible for every high government official to be a witting party to the terrorist action. Some, of course, can be given a specific task on a need to know basis, and they may or may not be able to intuit the larger design in which they are a cog. Others need to know everything. But the fully witting participants will number in the hundreds, not the thousands. This is Machiavelli’s most vehement advice in the chapter on conspiracies in The Discourses: keep the number of witting participants as low, limiting it if possible to oneself and at most one other person. In today’s society that would be too few. Of course, after the fact, more officials figure out what is going on, and thus join the ranks of the witting. But it ought to be axiomatic that the entire command structure cannot be in on the secret; what if somebody objects to the planned operation, and has the courage to do something about it? This might become very embarrassing for the plotters. Those who persist in seeing the state apparatus as a whole, of the US command structure as a whole as being behind 9/11 face the problem of what to do about the Phoenix memorandum and the Minneapolis actions, followed by the Rowley whistleblower memo. Here were government officials who were subjectively opposed to the 9/11 operation, even if they were only able to express this opposition in regard to the patsy network with which they were dealing.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:03 am

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

EXPERT PROFESSIONALS

Much low-level terrorism consists of crude local attacks on buses, supermarkets, hotels, and the like. Such actions are sometimes within the capability of low-level activists, but when we go beyond such actions, special technical preparation and training become necessary. When we get to the level of spectacular international terrorism of the type represented by 9/11, it is clear that only skilled professionals have the physical ability to produce the effects observed. The third sub-system which must examined to account for modern synthetic terrorism is therefore that of the expert professionals. They are the well- trained, well-equipped operatives who really do have the technical, physical, and mental ability to bring about the terrorist acts which the public sees. They are the members of the team which was indeed able, using the best state of the art sniper rifles and related equipment, to fire the requisite number of shots in Dealey Plaza, and to fire them with sufficient accuracy within the objective time limits imposed by the situation. They are the ice-cold technocrats of death who were able to direct the aircraft into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The expert professionals are the persons who can accomplish the amazing feats which the media attribute to the pathetic patsies.

The expert professionals and the patsies differ in many fundamental ways. The expert professionals are neither ideologues nor fanatics in the way that the patsies tend to be. They are proud of their professional competence. Not infrequently, they are mercenary in their motivation. They do not try to get noticed. They are not abrasive, and they do not go out of their way to pick quarrels with passersby. They do not give interviews, and would never hand out leaflets. Their goal is the lowest possible profile, and if possible, complete anonymity. They would always like to escape attention, and to melt away into the shadows. They come from out of town, and disappear as soon as their work is done. Their main occupational hazard is not that of arrest by the police, but their risk of being liquidated by their own employers as a basic security measure.

Because of these factors, we know less about the expert professionals than we do about the patsies, about whom so much gossipy detail is known, or about the moles, who cannot always escape detection after the fact. The attempt to identify the expert professionals is the same as the attempt to name the snipers of Dallas on November 22, 1963: we have no certitude, but only speculation. Were they disgruntled members of the French OAS? Were they central European fascists left over from World War II? We do not know.

There are, however, some instances in which something more about the expert professionals may be learned. At the end of the Cold War it turned out that the prime suspects in many of the terrorist attacks in Italy and other countries were in fact members of a CIA-sponsored stay-behind network, the Italian branch of which was called Gladio. The existence of Gladio was revealed to the Italian Parliament, which had never been informed, in a report issued by then-Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti on February 26, 1991. Apparently a secret clause of the North Atlantic Alliance required member states who might be subject to Soviet invasion and occupation to make some provision in advance for promoting armed resistance and guerrilla warfare against the feared Soviet occupiers of the future -- that was, at least, the cover story. In 1951 the Italian military intelligence, then called SIFAR, signed an agreement with the CIA on the creation of the infrastructure of a totally secret, clandestine stay-behind operation. This underground group was called Gladio, the Italian word for the Roman sword. Gladio was tasked with espionage, sabotage, guerrilla warfare, and propaganda in the event of a Soviet occupation. Its headquarters were located on the island of Sardinia, which the Italian general staff thought it could control even if mainland Italy had fallen to the Red Army.

In 1959, Gladio became an integral part of the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC) at SHAPE headquarters. Later, in 1964, it was included in the European-wide apparatus managed by the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) of NATO, along with US, UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and West Germany. When SIFAR became Sill and later SISMJ, Gladio continued to operate as its secret arm. Gladio was set up according to a cell structure, meaning that each team was compartmentalized and separated from all the other teams -- a good idea in case of Soviet invasion, but also a good way for a single cell to become the vehicle for spectacular terrorism if it happened to be composed of persons with a certain outlook. In peacetime, Gladio's activity was devoted largely to training and recruitment of new members. Some of the training was placed in the hands of the Training Division ofMI-6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, an institution that was directing terrorist operations on a grand scale when the CIA did not yet exist. Other training courses were set up at the CIA's so-called farm in Virginia. Operative links with the CIA were always present. Gladio had 40 cells: 6 for espionage, 10 for sabotage, 6 for propaganda, 6 for getting key people out of the Soviet- occupied zone, and 12 for guerrilla warfare. The sabotage and guerrilla warfare cells amounted to secret units of highly trained special forces commandos. This structure was somewhat revamped in 1974-76. There were 622 official members of Gladio, 83% of whom had been born before 1945, 16% between 1945 and 1960, and the rest born after 1960. These were of course cadres, or officers, around whom a much larger number of operatives would be assembled. We must also assume that this official report represents a modified limited hangout, designed to reveal a few facts, hide many more, and accustom public opinion to the existence of the secret structure by minimizing its importance. Other estimates of Gladio's numerical strength range up to 15,000, a more realistic figure.

In addition to the cells, Gladio also possessed large amounts of weapons and explosives. There were 138 secret arms deposits, most often buried in cemeteries, containing stocks of portable weapons, explosives, hand grenades, precision sniper rifles, radios, and other equipment. These were sealed in plastic containers to prevent rust and deterioration. According to Andreotti's report, these arms caches were buried during the 1960s. When they were all finally dug up again between 1973 and 1990, it turned out that two caches with 6 containers of arms and explosives in the province of Udine near the Yugoslav border had been pilfered. These would have been more than enough to provide the raw materials for the strategy of tension between 1967 and 1985, approximately. These weapons have never been recovered. Andreotti announced the dismantling of Gladio in 1990. According to the report, Belgium, France, Luxemburg, and Switzerland terminated their own secret stay-behind programs in 1990; Austria was said to have done so in 1970. As for Greece and Germany, it is not clear that the stay-behind networks were ever terminated. (For the original Italian text of Andreotti's report, see http://www.zaratrustra.it/relazionegladioandreotti.htm )

The hypothesis is unavoidable that the Gladio had drawn its recruits from the fascists of Mussolini's Italian Social Republic of 1943-1945 in northern Italy, behind German lines.

Since Gladio's mission was allegedly to prevent the country from becoming a permanent Soviet satellite, its commanders in SIFAR-SID-SISMI, CIA and MI-6 may have decided to act preemptively to use the secret Gladio capabilities plus its arms deposits to prevent the Italian Communists and their trade union allies from ever participating in the government, which they might have seen or pretended to see as a step towards Soviet domination. The circumstantial case is very strong that the Gladio teams provided the well-trained, well-equipped professionals who placed the bombs in Milan in 1969, in Brescia and the Italicus express in 1974, and at the Bologna railway station in 1980. In this, the Gladio people may have been assisted by such notorious SID- ISMJ assets as Stefano delle Chiaie, a terrorist who made his base in Madrid until the death of Franco and the fall of the fascist regime in 1976.

The case concerning Gladio as a state-sponsored terrorist underground grows stronger if we also consider the role of the P-2 or Propaganda Due freemasonic lodge. The existence of this secret power center became public knowledge in the early 1980s. Among the P-2 members were many of the most prominent political, financial, economic, media, and military leaders of Italy, including Andreotti and the current prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. There were no communists and no labor leaders present. The P-2 was most likely a descendant of a pro-Mazzini Masonic lodge sometimes identified as Propaganda Uno, which would have been functioning during the second half of the nineteenth century and in to the twentieth. P-2 was notable for its overwhelming links to the US. In the view of some, P-2 grandmaster Licio Gelli, a former fascist, and his assistant Umberto Grtolani, may have represented a command center for terror operations in Italy, including those executed by the trained professionals of the Gladio network. Or, more likely, they may have represented a conduit for instructions from higher up to be passed along to the various personalities of the local establishment.

Gladio in any case represents an extremely instructive case for students of 9/11. Here we have one of the five advanced industrial countries, a founding member of the European Community, and a member of NATO, in which state sponsored terrorism would appear to have been practiced for about 15 years on a very large scale, all as a matter of raison d'etat, specifically because of the Soviet threat. The human toll over this time numbers certainly in the hundreds, about one order of magnitude less than 9/11, but in a country about one fourth the size of the US. There seems to have been very little compunction about turning lethal terrorism against one's own population. Those who believe that a self-inflicted wound on the scale of 9/11 in the US case, organized by US intelligence networks, is a moral and human impossibility will gain no support from this example.

OPERATION NORTHWOODS

In July 1961, Democratic Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, noting the activities of General Edwin Walker, called for an investigation of the Institute for American Strategy, the Richardson Foundation, the National War College, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- all for subversive activity. Fulbright compared the mentality of some US military men to that of the GAS (Secret Army Organization) in Algeria, which plotted against General de Gaulle and was implicated in various assassination plots against him. All in all, there were about thirty attempts to kill the French President. (See Target de Gaulle)

Fulbright's warnings were more accurate than he knew at the time. The crucial exhibit in this regard is Operation Northwoods, a plan to provoke a war with Cuba, which was supported by the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff and their Chairman, General Lyman Lemnitzer. This document, titled "Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba" was provided by the JCS to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, General Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans covertly to engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. The documents of Operation Northwoods were first published in Australia by John Elliston in his PsyWar on Cuba: The Declassified History of U.S. Anti-Castro Propaganda (1999). They became prominent around the time of 9/11 thanks to the study Body of Secrets by James Bamford, a former ABC newsman.

Lemnitzer had worked with Allen Dulles during World War II, and was part of Dulles' Operation Sunrise, the separate surrender of German forces in Italy by SS General Karl Wolf Lemnitzer had helped to assemble the first stay-behind networks of the Gladio type, which were often staffed by former Nazis and fascists. Lemnitzer, along with Curtis LeMay of the Air Force, favored using the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 to provoke general nuclear war with the USSR. Robert Dallek's new biography of Kennedy documents the reckless and irresponsible advice Lemnitzer gave Kennedy on a number of military problems; it usually came down to recommending nuclear weapons under all circumstances as the only way to guarantee victory. In 1962 Lemnitzer was denied his ambition of being re-appointed to a second term as JCS chairman, but he was given the post of NATO Supreme Commander, where he presided over the creation of the first Gladio arms and explosives caches on the Italian front. Lemnitzer did not retire from active duty until 1969. President Gerald Ford asked Lemnitzer to join the agitation of the Committee on the Present Danger, a retread of a CIA front group from the early 1950s. The CPD was the private-sector arm of CIA Director George Bush's Team B, an exercise in anti-Soviet alarmism that foreshadowed the Feith-Luti-Shulsky Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon. Ford also promoted General William H. Craig, who had been a part of the Northwood cabal, to be the head of the Army Security Agency, an arm of the supersecret National Security Agency, the center of electronic surveillance. Lemnitzer died in November 1988.

Senator Albert Gore senior, the father of the later vice president, thought that Lemnitzer was a part of the subversive machinations associated with General Edwin Walker, who distributed inflammatory anti-Kennedy propaganda to his troops in Germany. When Walker returned to the US, he organized a racist riot against the hiring of a black professor at the University of Mississippi, and was prosecuted by Attorney General Robert Kennedy for sedition, insurrection, and rebellion. Walker was thought to have joined with French GAS military in plotting to kill de Gaulle; these same circles are also suspect in the Kennedy assassination. A little later, in 1963 and 1964, George H. W. Bush ran for the Senate in Texas on a platform that included the overthrow of Castro and the use of tactical nuclear weapons against North Vietnam. (Meyssan 2002 139-146)

General Edward Lansdale was one of the most prominent practitioners of special forces, special operations, and related utopian military methods during the Cold War. He was one of the leading architects of the catastrophic US involvement in Vietnam. Lansdale was the founder of the US Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Lansdale worked closely together with Allen Dulles, the Wall Street lawyer who became the head of the CIA during the Eisenhower administration, and who cooked up the plan for the Bay of Pigs and foisted it off on the newly inaugurated President Kennedy. When the Bay of Pigs failed, and Kennedy wisely decided to cut his losses by not throwing more military assets into what was already a hopeless debacle, the Allen Dulles clique and many counterinsurgency-oriented military officers blamed not their own incompetent planning, but Kennedy. In February, 1962, Robert Kennedy told Lansdale that his covert Operation Mongoose, a plot to kill Castro, should be frozen, and the emphasis shifted to gathering intelligence.

The Dulles-Lemnitzer-Lansdale networks should not be thought of as an extinct feature of the past, but rather as a living presence in the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, and other agencies. Given the track record of this network, they must necessarily come under scrutiny in the context of 9/11.

The Northwoods documents start from the premise that the US should be seeking war with Cuba over the short term for the purpose of regime change: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that a national policy of early military intervention in Cuba be adopted by the United States. They also recommend that such intervention be undertaken as soon as possible and preferably before the release of National Guard and Reserve forces presently on active duty." Part of the effort would be to demonize Castro and his communist government. The Northwoods planners thought that world opinion, and the United Nations forum, should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere." How could Castro be demonized? Norhtwoods: "Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government." In addition, "hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft could appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the Government of Cuba."

Northwoods planners did not hesitate to prescribe attacks on US ships, planes, or installations: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," they wrote; "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation." Northwoods had not forgotten the Maine incident of 1898. Nor did they hesitate to propose a murderous campaign of terror against US civilians: "We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," proposed the JCS planners. "The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States." So much for any notions that rogue Pentagon and CIA elements have any profound metaphysical inhibitions about killing their own troops or US citizens in general; this is an important lesson to bring to the analysis of 9/11.

In the search for a pretext, the JCS planners also considered a massacre of foreign citizens: "We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). ... We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized."

The most complicated project proposed by the Northwoods brainstormers was a plan to "create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight." From here the plan was articulated as follows:

An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. ...

From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will be transmitting on the international distress frequency a "May Day" message stating he is under attack by Cuban MiG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft, which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAG [International Civil Aviation Organization] radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the U.S. what has happened to the aircraft instead of the U.S. trying to "sell" the incident.


There was also a plan to "make it appear that Communist Cuban MIGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack." When Colonel John Glenn was about to attempt his orbital flight, Lemnitzer and the Northwoods cabal were ready. They did not explicitly prepare to sabotage Glenn's rocket, but they were ready to exploit any mishap to attain the goal which, as always, was the invasion of Cuba. Lemnitzer proposed that an astronaut disaster could be turned into a pretext for war "by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans."

The inventiveness of the Northwoods cabal was endless. They were eager to stage "a series of well coordinated incidents to take place in and around" the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This would entail a group of anti-Castro Cubans decked out in Cuban army uniforms who would "start riots near the main gate of the base. Others would pretend to be saboteurs inside the base. Ammunition would be blown up, fires started, aircraft sabotaged, mortars fired at the base with damage to installations."

Another path to war might be through embroiling the Cubans in conflict with other Caribbean nations through covert operations and US provocations: "Advantage can be taken of the sensitivity of the Dominican [Republic] Air Force to intrusions within their national air space. 'Cuban' B-26 or C-46 type aircraft could make cane burning raids at night. Soviet Bloc incendiaries could be found. This could be coupled with 'Cuban' messages to the Communist underground in the Dominican Republic and 'Cuban' shipments of arms which would be found, or intercepted, on the beach. Use of MiG type aircraft by U.S. pilots could provide additional provocation." Finally, there was a plan to make it appear that Communist Cuban MiGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack." It was a particularly believable operation given the decade of shoot downs that had just taken place. Lemnitzer was emphatic that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and not the CIA, ought to be in charge of these covert operations: "It is recommended," he concluded, "that this responsibility for both overt and covert military operations be assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff." ( http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/ )

Northwoods was never carried out in regard to Cuba. However, this; does not mean that these concepts were never implemented. In the Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 1964, two US destroyers were operating along the coast of North Vietnam very near South Vietnamese ships which were raiding and bombarding the north. The Pentagon then announced that the two destroyers, the Maddox and the Turner Joy, had been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. President Johnson then ordered US air strikes on nearby North Vietnamese ports and naval bases, and also used this incident to extort the infamous Gulf of Tonkin resolution from the Congress, which gave him unlimited power to wage war. Later, it turned out that there probably had not been any North Vietnamese torpedo boats, but more likely only ghost images on the radar screens of the destroyers. After the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Johnson was clearly embarked on the path of escalating the Vietnam war, with disastrous consequences for all concerned. The mind which produced Northwoods and the Gulf of Tonkin affair is a mind which would have no difficulty in producing 9/11. And there is no sign that those networks have ever been eradicated.

THE MOSSAD'S FALSE FLAG AL QAEDA CELL

Rashid Abu Shbak, the head of Palestinian Preventive Security in the Gaza Strip said on Friday, December 6, 2002 that his forces had identified a number of Palestinian collaborators who had been ordered by Israeli security agencies to "work in the Gaza Strip under the name of Al-Qaeda." Al-Jazeera TV reported that the Palestinian authorities had arrested a group of Palestinian "collaborators with Israeli occupation" in Gaza, who were trying to set up an operation there in the name of bin Laden's Al-Qaeda. The Palestinian Authority spokesman said the members of the group had confessed that they were recruited and organized by the Israeli intelligence, Mossad. Sharon had personally claimed on December 4, 2002 that he had proof of Al-Qaeda operations in Gaza, and used the allegations to justify brutal Israeli Defense Forces attacks in the Gaza Strip the next day -- which was the start of the Islamic holiday, Eid, celebrating the end of Ramadan. Ten civilians were killed in the IDF assaults. Reuters published an extensive featured story on the affair by Diala Saadeh on December 7, 2002, under the headline "Palestinians: Israel Faked Gaza Al Qaeda Presence." The article quoted President Arafat, who told reporters at his West Bank Ramallah headquarters, "It is a big, big, big lie to cover [Sharon's] attacks and his crimes against our people everywhere." Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo explained: "There are certain elements who were instructed by the Mossad to form a cell under the name of Al Qaeda in the Gaza Strip in order to justify the assault and the military campaigns of the Israeli occupation army against Gaza." (Haaretz, Reuters and Al Jazeera, December 7, 2002) Sharon is of course a past master of false-flag tactics like these, having been implicated in the direction of the Abu Nidal organization and also in the setting up of Hamas.

On Sunday, December 8, 2002, Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian Authority Planning and International Cooperation Minister, held a press conference with Col. Rashid Abu Shbak, head of the PA 's Preventive Security Apparatus in the Gaza Strip, to release documents and provide further information about the Israeli intelligence creation of a self-styled Al Qaeda cell. Shaath called on the diplomats to "convey to their countries that they assume the responsibility of exerting pressure on the Israeli government to stop the Israeli aggression," and announced that the PA had handed ambassadors and consuls of the Arab and foreign countries documents revealing the involvement of the Israeli Intelligence in recruiting citizens from Gaza Strip in a fake organization carrying the name of Qaeda. The goal of the operation was to create a new pretext for aggression against the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Shbak said that the PA had found eight cases of fake Al Qaeda recruiting over the previous nine months. Three Palestinians were arrested, while another 11 Palestinians were released, "because they came and informed us of this Israeli plot." The PA Security Service had traced mobile phone calls and e-mails, purportedly from Germany and Lebanon, back to Israel; these were messages asking Palestinians to join Al Qaeda. One e-mail even bore the forged signature of Osama bin Laden. "We investigated the origin of those calls, which used roaming, and messages, and found out they all came from Israel," Shbak said. The recruits were paired with collaborators in Gaza, and received money and weapons, "although most of these weapons did not work." The money was provided by collaborators, or transferred from bank accounts in Israel and Jerusalem. (Palestine Ministry of Public Information, Islam Online, December 9, 2002)

TERRORIST MURDER AS BRITISH STATE POLICY

In Apri12003, Great Britain was rocked by one of the greatest secret intelligence scandals in the entire postwar period. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens, the most senior police official in Great Britain, delivered the third installment of his report documenting that a special branch of British army intelligence had coordinated the murders of some thirty Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland in the years 1989-1990. Stevens had begun his investigation already back in 1989, but the report was not published until 2003, after two postponements during 2002. The Stevens investigation centered on the British Army intelligence's Force Research Unit (FRU), for working in collusion Protestant loyalist paramilitary groups to kill Catholics. An aggravating factor was that the head of the FRU at the time when these murders were being committed, in 1989-90, was an army officer named Gordon Kerr .Until February 2003, Kerr was the British military attache in Beijing, one of the highest military posts for a British military officer. Sir John Stevens confirmed that in that same month of February 2003 he was preparing papers for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) relating to a prosecution of Kerr. At that point Kerr, by then an army brigadier general, was moved to Kuwait, and was serving in Iraq when the Stevens report came out. (BBC, April 17, 2003)

The Stevens report represented, in its author's words, "the largest investigation undertaken in the United Kingdom," with 9,256 statements recorded, 10,391 documents logged (over 1 million pages), and 16,194 evidentiary exhibits seized. By Apri12003, the Stevens probe had generated 144 arrests and 94 convictions. (Stevens 17) Stevens' findings centered on collusion in the Finucane and other murders. "Collusion is evidenced in many ways. This ranges from the willful failure to keep records, the absence of accountability, the withholding of intelligence and evidence, through to the extreme of agents being involved in murder." (Stevens 18)

It was evident to all that Kerr and his FRU could never have committed such atrocities on their own, but would have required "orders from the highest level," that is, from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's office. Whether the Stevens investigation would implicate Thatcher remained to be seen. The British press was focused on the fact that Kerr's chief FRU operative for coordinating the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) in the commission of at least 30 murders was a certain Brian Nelson. Nelson, under Kerr's direction, had intrigued to become the UDA's intelligence chief In January 1990, the Stevens team identified Nelson as a key suspect, and planned to arrest him and others in a dawn raid. The officers went to their secure investigation headquarters, hours before the planned arrests, to find a fire raging in their offices, with fIfe alarms, telephones, and heat-sensitive intruder alarms not working, and with many of their files destroyed. This was an obvious case of arson. To top off the story, Brian Nelson died the week before Stevens III was issued, supposedly of a brain hemorrhage. The Stevens investigation had been launched in 1989, following the murder of top Catholic lawyer Pat Finucane. Finucane's family had always insisted that the security forces were involved in his murder, and dismissed the Stevens report as inadequate. Finucane's widow, Geraldine, demanded a full judicial inquiry as the only way to deal with the issue. Alex Maskey, the Lord Mayor of Belfast, commented on the Stevens report: "This is not about rogue elements with the British system. It is about a state policy sanctioned at the highest level."

The Stevens inquiry did not develop in a vacuum. It had been stimulated by the work of film- aker and author Sean McPhilemy, whose book, The Committee: Political Assassination in Northern Ireland, had appeared in 1998. McPhilemy systematically documented the murderous collusion among the British government, the British military, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Loyalist paramilitary death squads, and respected Protestant citizens in planning and perpetrating the murders of Republican paramilitaries and Catholics. The roles of the RUC, its Special Branch, the Force Research Unit, and British Army agent Brian Nelson, in the murder of human rights attorney Pat Finucane and others were revealed in McPhilemy's book. McPhilemy also provided evidence implicating British domestic intelligence (MI5) and Secret Air Services (SAS) commandos in these operations.

CONTROLLED CORPORATE MEDIA

It almost goes without saying that the effective political exploitation of a large-scale terrorist operation like 9/11 depends to an extraordinary degree on the complicity of the controlled corporate media. So far we have discussed moles primarily as a private network inside the visible government, but the media are honeycombed with moles as well: these are persons whose task it is to act in support of the terror project in its totality. On 9/11, it was the media moles who first began churning out the mythical party line about Bin Laden and al Qaeda. They are in this sense the main propagators of the myth, with Bush and others bringing up the rear. We have already suggested that a majority of the leaks implicating Bin Laden and al Qaeda on the basis of no evidence whatsoever probably came from Richard Clarke and George Tenet. It is no secret that the CIA has long recruited media managers and media personalities to be its agents of influence. The corporate bosses of the media conglomerates, in their capacity as powerful oligarchs, may also be more or less witting parties to the unfolding operation. They may therefore instruct their own media personalities on the line they are to espouse.

A COMMAND CENTER

This panoply of elements -- patsies, moles, professionals, and media -- clearly presupposes an additional element: a center of command and coordination to guide all these operational components towards the desired outcome. A number of accounts of 9/11 have gone so far as to suggest that President Bush himself was the coordinator, but it must be countered in all seriousness that this is impossible, and not only for the reason of mental and technical inability which must always be applied in questions of terror. As a matter of propaganda it is permissible and probably necessary to direct mass anger against Bush as the person generally responsible for 9/11; since he does qualify for this opprobrium in various ways, although not in the simple, linear way that some people might think. However, when we are attempting to analyze in detail how 9/11 came about, it is equally clear that in any serious conspiracy, a figure of the caliber of Bush 43 would normally be one of the last to know. He is after all merely a figurehead, a front man for the CIA-Brown Brothers Harriman-Skull & Bones-neocon-Bush family faction, which is itself an oligarchical congeries, not a disciplined, centralized apparatus.

It is hardly likely that the command center of 9/11 could have been in the upper reaches of government, and far more likely that it was outside of government altogether. Since Reagan's first term, the US intelligence community has been largely privatized under the aegis of Executive Order 12333. This means that the really crucial capabilities for an operation like 9/11 are no longer to be sought in the George Bush intelligence center in Langley, Virginia which houses the headquarters of the CIA, but rather in a myriad of private military firms, technology companies, think tanks, law firms, public relations firms, and front companies of all types. It is here, rather than a secret government office, that the planning and command center for 9/11 would normally be sought. However, given the considerable audacity of the operation, it cannot be excluded that some specific subdivisions of government agencies may have been involved. Possible candidates here might include a focal point operation within the Defense Department, or a special, secret military unit.

For those who find it incredible that terrorism against the Pentagon should be directed from inside the Pentagon, we recall that French President Francois Mitterrand, Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, and Italian financier Michele Sindona each at one time or another caused a near-miss terror attack against himself, presumably as a means of garnering public sympathy.

CONDUCTED BY A NETWORK

It is important to stress that large-scale synthetic terrorism of the 9/11 type is generally conducted, not so much by identifiable institutions acting as a totality, but rather by a network or faction of like-minded plotters which cuts across the institutions transversally. It is not the visible, elected government which plots terrorism, but rather the parallel, invisible, or secret government, and that secret government is hidden inside the public and elected one. The essence of this phenomenon is a private network which has ensconced its operatives in decisive, influential positions, from which entire bureaucracies can be controlled, manipulated, or paralyzed. To take an extreme case, it might be argued that the FBI belongs completely to a network of moles. But even though the power of the moles in the FBI is admittedly very great indeed, the Phoenix memo and the Colleen Rowley memo are enough to show that even the FBI is not composed exclusively of moles. That the FBI generally acts like a mole organization pure and simple is due to the preponderant power of certain well-placed moles who can make the institution do what their faction wants on key issues.

The secret, private network at the higher levels of the US government which was behind 9/11 has been around for some time. We see its footprints in such events as the U-2 crisis, the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassination, the Martin Luther King/Robert Kennedy assassinations, parts of Watergate, Iran-Contra, the bombing of Kosovo (and of the Chinese embassy in (Belgrade), the Kursk incident, and other operations. This list could be extended. It is an aggressive, imperialistic, murderous network, restlessly seeking to preserve itself through conflict and confrontation.

In waging political conflict, it is often necessary and indispensable to personalize matters by encouraging citizens to direct their anger at an odious leader of the opposing faction; this often allows a more efficient mobilization than calling for the defeat of an abstraction or of a collectivity. In this sense, it is good politics and close to the truth to blame Bush for 9/11, but not in the simple way that many might think. It is a naive argument to say that if there was US government collusion in 9/11, which there certainly was, then this proves that the titular head of the US government and tenant of the White House, G. W. Bush, must have been the leader of the plot. This reflects a media-conditioned overestimation of the powers of the presidency. After the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the US oligarchy made a collective pledge that never but never would they ever allow an elected leader actually to exercise the constitutional powers of the presidency. This was codified in the term limit contained in the XXII Amendment of 1947 -1951, which has weakened the office of the presidency in comparison to earlier times. Then began the parade of puppet presidents: Harry S Truman was always susceptible to blackmail for his role in the crooked Pendergast machine of Missouri; Truman meekly took his orders from a committee that included Clark Clifford, Dean Acheson, Averill Harriman, and Robert Lovett, and the oligarchy has held him up as exemplary ever since. Eisenhower was the easy-going chairman of the board who did not force Montgomery and Patton to coordinate during World War II; much of the real power was exercised by the Dulles brothers. The oligarchy considered Kennedy a playboy and sex maniac; he turned out to be a man of much positive principle. Kennedy showed his willingness to put the Federal reserve on a leash, forced Wall Street in the person of US Steel to back down, and refused to let his advisers (EXCGMM) use the Cuban missile crisis to launch world war against the USSR, and the response of the oligarchy came the following year. Lyndon B. Johnson's pathologies crippled him, despite his apparent power, and made him accept the Vietnam adventure Kennedy had refused. Doris Kearns Goodwin has studied this matter well enough in her book on LBJ. Richard Nixon had been through a kind of nervous breakdown during the 1960s through his loss of the 1962 California gubernatorial election and the death of his mother; he was willing to take orders from Kissinger, who took them from the Rockefeller brothers, etc. Ford, according to LBJ, was so mentally impaired that he was not capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. Carter had gone through a nervous breakdown of his own after being ousted as Governor of Georgia. Reagan had learned to mask his mean and vindictive tendencies behind a mask of avuncular joviality; he acted the role of the good uncle, one of the archetypes of the American ideology, but he delegated most decisions, after Haig was forced out, to Bush and Baker. In the meantime, Reagan dozed and drooled; by 1987 his mental impairment was obvious enough to cause a scandal. Bush 41 was a very sick man by the second half of his presidency; his thyroid problem was the symptom of psychosomatic disorders which live on in the various syndromes exhibited by his son, such as the penchant for snap decisions. (Tarpley 1992) Bush 41 had made his career thanks to Kissinger, and he let Kissinger's partners Scow croft and Eagleburger share power with Baker. On big issues, like the Kuwait crisis, Bush took orders from Thatcher. Dukakis, the Democratic competitor in 1988, was also a seriously disturbed personality, as I pointed out at the time. Clinton was profiled, like JFK, as a sex maniac and Anglophile, but he turned out to be more intelligent than the oligarchs had reckoned with. He was accordingly allowed to serve two terms, but real power was seized after January 1998 by the Principals' Committee acting under cover of impeachment. The mental wreck that is Bush 43 is described in detail in another section of this book. All in all, the oligarchy favors candidates who are intellectually and morally incapable of governing according to the full powers of the office, and who are therefore willing to have their options pre-determined by servants of finance oligarchy from the Washington establishment. In any case, much of the original power of the presidency has been transferred to the unelected and unaccountable Federal Reserve Board.

During the Reagan years, a high administration official told me that the permanent bureaucratic class considered Reagan a perfect president. His job, said this official, was to be a head of state, which meant that his task came down to ministering to the emotional and symbolic needs of the country during moments of great sorrow and stress -- given that there were now more disasters than victories. The assistant secretaries and the deputy assistant secretaries actually ran the government through the interagency groups and special interagency groups -- and these were the figures who controlled the principals in the later principals' committee. The presidency was symbolic, while the permanent bureaucracy (plus the White House palace guard) made up a kind of collective prime minister who actually made decisions and ran the government -and even that within the parameters defined by the controlled corporate media. Given all this, the notion that the US president possesses real power, or makes real decisions, is slightly fantastic. According to Bush's own testimony, he saw himself as a symbolic figure needing to project strength, rather than as a crisis manager, during the crucial minutes at the Booker School, during the reading of "My Pet Goat." The government was being run by Richard Clarke of the permanent bureaucracy, who also made the call on al Qaeda.

David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor has represented a significant progress in 9/11 research, but this book has the defect of listing as suspects only identifiable institutions, such as the intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, and the White House. In reality, the likely suspect is a network of mo les that cuts across all of these, but which most likely keeps its center of gravity and command center somewhere in the privatized public sector.

P2OG AS OFFICIAL AGENTS PROVOCATEURS

Newspaper readers may have not believed their eyes when they read the following story:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26, 2002 (UPI) --The United States should create an elite group of counter-terror operatives to make the war on terrorism pre-emptive and proactive, duping al Qaida into undertaking operations it is not prepared for and thereby exposing its personnel, a Pentagon report advocating more than $7 billion in new spending will recommend. The counter-terror operations group alone would require 100 people and at least $100 million a year. Rather than simply trying to find and foil terrorists' plans -- the approach that characterizes the current strategy -- the "Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group" -- known as P2OG -- would devise ways to stimulate terrorists into responding or moving operations, possibly by stealing their money or tricking them with fake communications, according to the report.

The group would be comprised of specialists in information operations, psychological operations, computer network attack, covert activities, signal intelligence, human intelligence, special operations forces and deception operations. The Defense Department already maintains a secretive counter-terror operations group known as Delta Force that is called in when a crisis happens; P2OG would focus its efforts on preventing those crises from even occurring in the first place.


The starting point for this operation appears to be Rumsfeld, who said in May 2002: "Prevention and preemption are ...the only defense against terrorism. Our task is to find and destroy the enemy before they strike us." This is plainly a proposal for the creation of de facto terror cells under the authority of the Pentagon. If the goal is to provoke terror, there is nothing to prevent P2OG from infiltrating agents into existing terror groups, or creating its own terror groups, with the mission of causing those groups to engage in specific terrorist attacks. There is no form of supervision or oversight which could ever guarantee that abuses of this type would not take place; they would be inherent in the design of the project itself Indeed, just the fact that the project outline exists strongly suggests that P2GG also exists, and has presumably been at work.
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