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.
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