Altruistic World Online Library

PART 3 OF 3 (CH. 9 CONT'D.)

THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE VIEW: NAMAKON

The Russian opposition weekly newspaper Zaftra, edited by the maverick Russophile Aleksandr Prokhanov, published on July 16, 2002 excerpts from a German-language EIR news agency report on the background of the attempted internal U.S. coup of 9/11. EIR's thesis was that "the New York and Washington attacks could not have occurred without the witting complicity of high-level rogue elements within the US military-intelligence command structures." Together with this material, Zaftra included some comments on the 9/11 issue from "Namakon" -- the pen-name used by a group of top-level former Soviet intelligence officers. Namakon agreed that the events of September 11 could not have occurred without high-level complicity by a network or faction within the U.S. military. Namakon also emphasized that the decision by President Bush, urged on by Tony Blair and others, on the evening of September 11 to endorse and embrace the Bin Laden cover story "meant a de facto capitulation of the U.S. Presidency to the real organizers of the attack, and the adoption of their policy of confrontation with the Islamic world, according to Huntington's formula for a 'Clash of Civilizations."'

Namakon also called attention to the much-neglected fact that the attempted orchestration of an escalating nuclear alert between the U.S. and Russia was a crucial part of the 9/11 coup plot. Namakon explicitly linked this potential for thermonuclear confrontation with the August 2000 sinking of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, the full story of which has yet to be told. Namakon wrote that this "hypothesis leads us to ask whether the Kursk catastrophe might not also have been an included facet of the operations of the US putsch group, since an attack of such dimensions would necessarily lead to a large-scale reaction by the Russian military and population, creating an atmosphere favorable to provoking nuclear escalation." The escalation of the Kursk incident, which high ranking Russian military officials repeatedly blamed on the presence of NATO submarines near the site of the sinking in the Barents Sea, came perilously close to succeeding. A serious confrontation was avoided only by a direct hot line consultation between Russian President Putin and then-U.S. President Clinton. This telephone call was followed within 48 hours by a highly unusual visit to Moscow by CIA Director George Tenet. (Zaftra, July 16, 2002; EIR, July 22, 2004) In the case of 9/11, the immediate parallel was the telephone conversation between Bush and Putin, which, strangely enough, is never mentioned by an otherwise well-informed author like Bamford.

Many features of the analysis developed here with the help of lsraeli, French, and Russian sources in particular have become current among well-informed European circles. On August 23, 2002, at a moment when the neocon drive for war with Iraq appeared stalled, an influential British political figure made the following comments to the late investigative journalist Mark Burdman of EIR:

I have been noticing, as you have, the growing opposition, in Britain, in the United States, to this Iraq war. Last night, something occurred to me that I think is very relevant. I think the crowd that wants this Iraq war may well do something drastic in the coming days to regain the momentum. Some very big terrorism, perhaps. It is all very well that there are these challenges to the Iraq war. But we should not lose sight of the fact that there are powerful people in Washington, who pulled off this September 11 last year. They have their Plan A, which is now in trouble. But they also have their Plan B, Plan C, Plan D. They may well have been thinking until very recently that their coup that began on September 11 was going very well. But suddenly, they have to re-think. And I think they are desperate, and capable of a lot. (EIR, August 23, 2002)

In other words, the rogue network was still in place, and it might resort to a new round of terrorism.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 -- WHAT A REAL PRESIDENT WOULD HAVE SAID

We now leave the terrain of what actually happened, and move to a hypothetical sphere in which we can best try to shed further light on the events of 9/11. At this point a detailed account and timelines of what really happened behind the scenes on 9/11 cannot be attempted. However, we can speculate as to what an honest and courageous president might have done. Such a president might not have immediately understood the full scope of the 9/11 plot, but he would have insisted upon political accountability for appointed officials and on an immediate and thorough investigation. Some guidance might have come from an examination of the Ed Meese press conference of November 1986 which blew the lid off the Iran-contra scandal, and which was accompanied by the firing of Oliver North and John Poindexter, then the NSC director. The speech on the evening of 9/11 might have sounded something like this:

My fellow citizens:

Today our country and our political system have been targeted by large-scale acts of terrorism. These are monstrous crimes against humanity, and they will not go unpunished. We send our solidarity to the brave firemen, policemen, military people, and office workers who have borne the brunt of this assault. We promise an equitable and equal compensation for the human losses of this day. Insistent and irresponsible voices have been raised in my own White House and in the intelligence agencies, and have inspired media reports attributing these attacks to Arab or Islamic terrorists of the al Qaeda Bin Laden organization. But this is no time for snap decisions or a rush to judgment when we are dealing with the present and future peace of the world. It is true that we have bitter enemies around the world, but the capabilities displayed today appear to go far beyond the technical and physical means available to al Qaeda. We must also recall that, under the reckless and irresponsible policies of my predecessors, the CIA had been one of the main sponsors of Bin Laden and al Qaeda. If we think back to the attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, we remember that media voices attempted in the first hours to attribute that tragedy to the Arab world. Although I am convinced that we still do not know the full story of Oklahoma City, it is clear that the Arab world was not involved.

There are too many unanswered questions at this point. How were the terrorists who seem to have been involved allowed to enter the United States and operate freely in this country? Why was there no air defense over a period of one hour and fifteen minutes? I have ordered an immediate inquiry into this question, and in the meantime I have accepted the resignations of Gen. Myers of the Air Force, the deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and of Gen. Bernhard of NORAD, whose agency failed the people today. There is also evident reason to believe that the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service have not performed satisfactorily, based on the fragmentary accounts available so far. I have therefore accepted the resignations of the leaders of those agencies, and of their principal deputies. I have furthermore accepted the resignation of the Secretary of Defense and his deputy, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Transportation, and of my National Security Adviser, since it is evident to me that they could not continue to serve the nation effectively because of the immense tragedy which has occurred on their watch. We rightly demand accountability from teachers, from railroad engineers, and from physicians. We therefore have all the more reason to demand accountability and responsibility from those who have been entrusted with the management of the executive departments, several of which have not served us well today.

Another question involves the collapse of the World Trade Center towers many minutes after they had been impacted by the airplanes. These events, as you know, represent an absolute anomaly in the history of skyscrapers. In particular, there is no explanation whatsoever for the collapse of building seven at five o 'clock in the afternoon.

Accordingly, and consistent with our urgent measures to save any victims remaining in the rubble, I am ordering the Seventh Mountain Division of Fort Drum, New York, to seize control of the site of the World Trade Center, cordoning it off as a crime scene and taking immediate measures for preserving the evidence we must have to determine what really happened. Not one scrap of metal will be removed before a full forensic survey has been carried out. Contrary to media accounts, we have not been able to identify the flying object which apparently hit the Pentagon, although it seems likely that it was not a Boeing 757, and thus could hardly have been United flight 73. As for the tragedy over Shanksville, we are investigating whether this aircraft was shot down by our own forces, and why. All crash sites are being secured by military units, acting under my direct orders, whose loyalty to the Constitution is beyond question.

The overriding question is whether the criminals who acted today enjoyed support or collaboration from within our own country and even within our own government. I have created a special unit of federal investigators which will act under my direct orders and which will report to me and to me alone. The first task of that unit will be to determine why there was no air defense, in violation of the standard operating procedures of NORAD and the FAA. Another task will be to examine the entire roster of FBI and CIA double agents presently infiltrating terrorist groups and how they are managed, with a view to identifying possible factors of collusion. Another task will be to determine why our watch list procedures and other forms of vigilance were not effective in screening the criminals out.

As far as the FBI is concerned, I urge the Congress to join me in breaking up this tragically dysfunctional agency. After Ruby Ridge, Waco, the FBI crime lab, Wen Ho Lee, the Atlanta Olympics and Richard Jewel, the withheld documents in the McVeigh case, we now have September 11, 2001. The FBI has never recovered from the corruption and mismanagement instilled during the fifty year reign of J. Edgar Hoover, a man whom we know today to have been unfit for public office. The FBI has many dedicated public servants, but they are trapped today in a structure of incompetence, corruption, and worse. Accordingly, I am placing the FBI into receivership by executive order with immediate effect; this agency will operate for the time being under the direction of my special assistant for internal security.

In determining the full scope of what happened today, I need the help of all our citizens. If you know something important about what happened today, I want to hear it. Call the White House and talk with one of my staff, who are mobilized to take your calls. If you see anyone, including especially federal agents, attempting to tamper with evidence, or if a federal agent attempts to intimidate you into saying you saw or heard something you did not see, I want to know about that, too.

I am also determined to find out if foreign intelligence agencies or foreign citizens were involved in today's events. I am appointing myself as temporary Director of the CIA, and in that capacity I will undertake a comprehensive review of foreign operations on American soil. No foreign agency will be exempted, and I promise you a full initial progress report.

In addition to the immediate investigations I have mentioned so far, I am also empanelling a board of inquiry to study today's events and offer a second opinion on what may have gone wrong. I am asking Senator Byrd to be the chairman of this body, and Lawrence Walsh, a Republican, the former Iran-contra prosecutor, to be the vice chairman. I have invited former Secretary of the Treasury O 'Neill, former President Carter, General Zinni, former Governor Ryan of Illinois to serve. I am also actively soliciting participation by outsiders and academics who have been critics of our government policies of recent years. I am inviting Susan Sontag, Eric Foner, Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Howard Zinn, and Seymour Hersh to become members of the board of inquiry. Let them play the devil's advocates, if they will, so long as we obtain truth and justice. They will all receive the necessary security clearances directly from me personally, if necessary. I will personally supervise the rapid declassification of documents as recommended by the board of inquiry in order to educate the public about the board's findings. We all remember the failure of the Warren Commission; that failure will not be repeated during my presidency.

I recall the words of President Eisenhower in the wake of the Kennedy assassination: the American people, he commented will not be stampeded. I ask you to support your government and its constitutional institutions, and not to give way to the voices of hatred, fear, aggression, and paranoia. I promise that swift justice will be rendered for those who have struck us today, no matter who they turn out to be.

These dastardly attacks will not force this great nation off course; they will not force us to become something we are not. We will remain ourselves. We will go forward in the great American tradition of the Monroe Doctrine, the Good Neighbor Policy, the Bretton Woods system, the Marshall Plan, and the Four Freedoms of the Atlantic Charter, starting with the freedom from fear.

Further attacks cannot be ruled out in the coming days and weeks. Because of the office I hold, and because of the constitutional responsibilities I must meet, I ask for your support -- no matter what may happen during the coming days and weeks.

Good night.

SEPTEMBER 25, 2001 -- WHAT A REAL PRESIDENT WOULD HAVE SAID

A real president would have glanced at Cicero's orations against Catiline, with which that orator had gone into the Roman Senate to stop the impending coup d'etat of the bankrupt aristocrat Lucius Sergius Catilina in 63 BC, who had planned to seize power through a massacre of Roman political leaders. He would have been mindful of General de Gaulle's 1962 speech in which he expressed his determination to defeat the coup attempt of four fascist generals in Algiers.

My fellow citizens:

Tonight I would like to present, as promised; a progress report on the investigations into the events of September 11, investigations which have been the main task of your government over the past several weeks. The tidings I bring you this evening are very grave, and they are related to the tempestuous events of the last few days which are known to you in whole or in part.

As many of you may know, during the morning of 9/11 the White House received a telephone call saying, "Angel is next." "Angel " was the top-secret code word designating my official aircraft, Air Force One, so this was a threat to shoot down Air Force One. It was also something more: as I realized immediately, it was quite possible that this telephone call had indeed come from the authors of the 9/11 terror attacks. If that was so, there existed the definite possibility that this group, whoever they were, also had access to other top-secret code words used by our government. This meant that there was imminent danger that the terrorist group might possess the code words and related signals that could be used to target thermonuclear ballistic missiles on targets in foreign countries -- or even here at home. A duplicate of the briefcase known as "the football," which follows me everywhere, might be in the hands of the plotters. I decided at once to proceed as quickly as possible to the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Nebraska with a small force of bodyguards for the purpose of countermanding, by the immediate physical presence of the commander in chief, any and all illegal attack orders that might be issued by the rogue terrorist network which had so plainly declared war on our country. My intent was to assume direct personal control over the nuclear deterrent forces of this country, wherever they might be located.

During my flight to Nebraska, I received a phone call which presented this threat in the most concrete form. The call came from a man who identified himself as the spokesman for a secret organization of clandestine operatives and special forces -- clearly a subversive and insurrectionary group acting as a tool for a coterie of very powerful, wealthy, and ruthless persons. This spokesman told me that his organization had orchestrated the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as a means of reversing the inexorable decline of American power in the world -- a process which I and my elected predecessors had been wholly negligent in allowing, he asserted. He also demanded that I immediately make a televised public statement identifying al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, Afghanistan, and Iraq as those responsible for the terror attacks, and announcing our government's plans to invade and occupy these two countries. Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, he added, might have to come later. If l failed to accept this ultimatum, the conspirators were determined to use the nuclear launch code words in their possession to destroy Cairo, Baghdad, Teheran, Rabat, Tunis, Karachi, Jakarta, Damascus, Pyongyang, Riyad, Havana, and possibly other cities. That would start 100 years of war of civilizations, they told me, and once it had started, nothing could stop it. I told this spokesman that he and his group, in addition to being guilty of high treason, were courting suicide. The Russian Federation might interpret the missile firings as the beginning of a US first strike against Russian targets, and might respond by initiating procedures for launch under attack, in an attempt to use their nuclear assets against us before they were destroyed on the ground. The People's Republic of China might respond in the same way. These countries might also conclude that our government had been taken over by madmen, and that their only hope of safety might lie in the use of military means against us. The spokesman for the group of plotters replied that those dangers were real, but that it was up to me to avoid this danger by granting the demands of the terrorist controllers, which came down to US attacks on Afghanistan, and Iraq, with the overthrow of the government of Saudi Arabia likely along the way. The terror group, he boasted, welcomed the bloody global conflict that I seemed to fear, and even regarded the prospect of world war engulfing this planet as preferable to the relative decline of the United States for which he said I and those like me were responsible.

At this moment, our country faced the greatest danger in our entire history. To accept the ultimatum of the plotters and to wage war against their target list of Arab and Islamic states would have cast the United States adrift on an ocean of blackmail, lies, and adventures. Blackmailers always escalate their demands, and the addiction to terrorism of the victorious criminal network might have poisoned our national life for decades, or even for centuries. If I had capitulated; I would have been a puppet of the plotters for as long as I remained in office, indeed for the rest of my life. On the other side, the danger of world war was immediate. I decided that the only honorable course coherent with my oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution was to defy the terrorists. At this point we had reached the SAC headquarters in Nebraska. I terminated my conversation with the spokesman for the plotters.

At this point, I activated several units of the Secret Service and Army intelligence under hand- icked officers whose constitutional loyalty I knew I could trust. I briefed them on what I knew so far, and gave them the task of finding the rogue terror network and rooting it out. These fine patriotic men and women went to work at once, and within 72 hours the main outlines of the plot were evident. Let me sum up what we have learned so far.

A group of al Qaeda operatives, manipulated by a cabal of rogue CIA case officers, had chosen September 11 to hijack several aircraft, force them to land, and use the passengers as hostages to extort the liberation of certain prisoners being held in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Among these al Qaeda operatives were several double agents, also under the control of rogue elements in our own intelligence community. These were dissolute and evil persons, who had been trained using the infrastructure left over from the Iran-contra affair.

Air defense that day was completely absent, in part because of four air exercises which were taking place at the same time in various parts of North America. A number of officers in critical positions at NORAD, its regional office in Rome, New York, and in the FAA appear to have been party to the plot. By a kind of collective inertia, they ignored the well-known and long-established standard operating procedures which govern the cooperation of FAA and NORAD, and were able to misdirect our few remaining fighter interceptors, out over the Atlantic Ocean in one case. More arrests are imminent as a result of ongoing investigations in this area.

What the al Qaeda operatives apparently did not know was that the aircraft they had chosen to hijack had been equipped with a new technology making it possible to seize control of these aircraft and operate them by remote control from a command center on the ground. It was this new technology, and not the dubious skills of the hijackers, which allowed the planes to hit their targets with such precision.

But even direct hits by the two planes could not have been enough to bring down the towers. According to the information we have developed; the collapse of World Trade Center buildings one, two, and seven was the direct result of controlled demolition -- the result of explosive charges which had been placed in these buildings over the previous days and weeks by the terror network, who infiltrated the buildings in the guise of cleaning and security personnel. We have not yet been able to solve all the problems posed by the collapse of the twin towers, since energy sources appear to have been at work which go beyond the realm of today's conventional technology. I will have more to report on this later, In the meantime, I regret to report that I have had to order the arrest of the Mayor of New York, who repeatedly attempted to bring about the destruction of evidence at the crime scene.

As for the Pentagon, it was struck by a US Air Force cruise missile fired from an aircraft above West Virginia, and not by one of the hijacked airliners. We have not yet been able to determine what happened to American flight 77, and we call on citizens to come to our aid in this matter. The launch of the cruise missile was the work of an entire Air Force unit in Ohio, and these traitors have all been taken into custody.

The airplane that crashed in Shanksville was cynically shot down through the actions of a rebel mole placed in a highly sensitive position at NORAD. This mole was aware that the passengers had retaken control of the aircraft from the lightly armed hijackers, and realized that the interrogation of the hijackers on board would have revealed critical dimensions of the real plot in which the hijackers, although certainly acting with criminal intent, were ultimately mere expendable pawns. The NORAD mole also feared that an examination of the aircraft might reveal the presence of the remote control technology, which had for some reason failed to function. Accordingly, the mole cynically directed jet interceptors to destroy this airplane, even though it was far away from any target of interest to the hijackers.

Several FBI officials and agents have been indicted for obstruction of justice; they have been accused of destroying security camera tapes at the Pentagon, and intimidating witnesses at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Members of the FBI crime lab and the NTSB team have been discovered attempting to sabotage the cockpit voice recorders of the planes in question; the recordings we have heard are consistent with the account of the 9/11 events I have just described.

Sadly, I must address the three mysterious suicides from the highest ranks of our own government which have caused so much speculation over the past several days. The vice president was found dead in his bunker at Site R last Thursday; the coroner has ruled this a suicide, and has established that the cause of death was a potassium cyanide pill. The same finding has been delivered in the case of the former deputy secretary of defense some hours later on that same day. The death of the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by a gunshot wound to the head in the Pentagon at around that same time has also been ruled a suicide. I can only confirm that arrest warrants for all three had been issued by a federal grand jury empanelled to investigate the tragic events of September 11.

The mutiny of the Delta Force battalion based near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, has been quelled by loyal troops and planes. The appeal of the rebel commander for a military rebellion against the legal government and for a military coup has been ignored.

As you may also know, a top former anti-terror official and several other high officials of the CIA and FBI have been missing for over two weeks, and are presumed to have fled abroad. I can confirm that arrest warrants have been issued for these persons. A number of journalists have also disappeared, and this may also be related to the recent upheaval. I can assure you that our constitutional procedures are just as vigorous as they have ever been, that habeas corpus remains alive, well, and in full force. We have no secret prisons and no secret prisoners, and I will tolerate none. Our open courts continue to function, and they will continue to do so.

We have uncovered complicity between the rogue network in this country and a number of foreign intelligence agencies. One of these is the British MI-6. After the raid by Scotland Yard on the headquarters of MI-6 in Oxford Circus, and after the resignation of Mr. Blair, I look forward to working with the new Labour Party prime minister to eradicate any remaining insurrectionary elements. We continue to observe the situation in several other countries we believe may have been involved in the 9/11 plot. I regret that General Sharon has refused to cooperate, and I invite the Congress to consider what response may be required.

I would like to thank President Putin of the Russian Federation and the leadership of the People's Republic of China for their wisdom and restraint, especially during the morning of 9/11, when the rebel network engaged in visible preparations for a nuclear launch. I am certain that the great powers, having weathered this storm, will be able to return to the path of confidence building measures at our summit next week.

More details will be announced as soon as practicable. In conclusion, let me say a few words about the state of the world.

I do not assert that terrorism is a spontaneous outgrowth of poverty and misery. In fact, I assert the opposite: terrorism is usually organized by an outside agency, often by a government or a network operating inside a government. But it is certainly true that poverty and misery provide the indispensable environment in which terrorist groups can recruit, or be created by intelligence agencies. In today's world, there are about 2 billion people who are attempting to get by on less than $1 per day. There are some 600 million homeless -- that is equal to about the entire population of Europe. About one and one half billion people do not have clean water to drink. With about one billion people unemployed, the unemployment rate in our world is about 33%, about one third. When that happened in our own country during the 1930s, we called that a great depression, and we must therefore acknowledge the existence of a world economic depression of unprecedented severity today. Two thirds of the people in the world -- 65% -- have never made a phone call. About 40% do not have access to electricity for household use; I would call that a clear need for rural and urban electrification. Every day in this world of ours, some 40,000 human beings perish from malnutrition and from easily treated diseases like diarrhea. Another 40,000 lose their lives each month as the result of warfare, all of which is absolutely futile and which has often been cynically fomented by foreign economic interests. I am thinking here of the crisis in Africa most specifically. In Africa, the standard of living of the average family has declined by 20% over the last twenty years. Eighty-nine countries are now worse off than they were at the beginning of the 1990s. 175 million people leave their home countries every year in the desperate search for jobs and food -- about 3% of humanity. The price of a human slave on the slave markets of southern Europe at this very moment is about 4,000 euros. In the midst of all this, the two hundred fifty-eight richest persons in the world own more in the way of assets and other property than the poorest 3 billion persons. When two hundred fifty eight own more than half of the human population of the world, I hope you will agree with me that such a world cannot be stable. Yet, this is the world that lies before us. I plan to use my powers as president to ameliorate this situation with every means at my disposal, and I call upon the Congress and upon all citizens to support these steps for a new world economic order that will be more just, more equitable, more prosperous, and more dynamic.

We have now been tested in the crucible of a brutal crisis. From this experience we must take renewed devotion to our best values. The decade of globalization has been revealed as a colossal failure, for ourselves as well as for others. We must find a better, more humane, more equitable way of organizing the affairs of this planet, To do this, we must work closely with almost two hundred sovereign states, and work out the details with them, since every country has an inherent right to economic development, science, technology, and dignity. The old imperialism denied these, and the old imperialism is now on the junkheap of history. In the days to come, my two lodestars will be peace and economic development, seen as the two sides of the same coin. Our world has turned over several times in the past month, but I am more certain than ever that I can count on the support of the American people in getting the world back on the right track. I ask you once again to remember the victims of the recent tragedy in your prayers. Good night.

CONCLUSIONS

So far we have come to the following conclusions:

1. The government's assertion that the so-called hijackers operated without being detected by official surveillance is untenable, and evidence is strong that the alleged hijackers acted in coordination with a faction within the government itself. The hijackers were therefore in all probability expendable double agents or, more bluntly, patsies.

2. The government's assertion that the four supposedly hijacked airliners were taken over and piloted by the four accused hijackers identified by the FBI is at or beyond the limits of physical and technical reality. The planes were in all probability guided to their targets by some form of remote access or remote control.

3. The government's assertion that the failures o fair defense were caused by the fog of war is lame and absurd. Air defense was in all probability sabotaged by moles operating inside the government.

4. The government's assertion that a Boeing 757-200 hit the Pentagon is physically impossible. Some other type of flying object, possibly a cruise missile, must therefore be considered.

5. The government's assertion that the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center collapsed as a result of the impact of aircraft and of the subsequent fire is physically impossible. The fall of the towers cannot be explained without the hypothesis of controlled demolition of some form, possibly including unconventional methods employing new physical principles.

6. The government's assertion that World Trade Center 7 collapsed at 5:20 PM EDT on September 11 purely as a result of fire is physically impossible. The collapse of WTC 7 is coherent with controlled demolition of the conventional type.

7. The government's assertion that United Flight 93 crashed because of actions by the hijackers or because of a struggle in the cockpit is physically impossible, given the pattern in which the wreckage was distributed. All evidence points towards the hypothesis that United 93 was shot down by US military aircraft.

8. The government's refusal to investigate insider trading in American Airlines and United Airlines put options, the wholesale seizure and destruction of evidence, the systematic intimidation of witnesses by the FBI, and a series of other incidents point unmistakably to an attempted coverup on the part of the entire US government and establishment.

BUSH IN HELL

At the bottom of Dante's Inferno, in that third part of the traitors' ninth circle which is called Tolomea, Dante and Vergil encounter a certain Frate Alberigo of Faenza. Tolomea is devoted to that species of traitors who have betrayed their own guests. The peculiarity of Frate Alberigo is that he is apparently alive on earth, even while his soul is being tormented in the depths of Hell. Frate Alberigo explains that in cases of particularly heinous betrayal, the damned soul departs from the body and descends directly into Hell. The body remains alive, but it is operated by a demon during the rest of its natural life span. Something similar happened to Bush when he betrayed his oath of office by turning the US government over to the rogue network on 9/11. The demon has been in control ever since.

_______________

Notes:

4. For Putin's statements related to 9/11, see John O'Loughlin, Gearaid O Tuathail (Gerard Toal), and Vladimir Kolossov, " A 'Risky Westward Turn '? Putin's 9-11 Script and Ordinary Russians."

CHAPTER X: ANTHRAX

The anthrax incidents of October 2001 must be regarded as an integral part of the entire 9/11 operation. The 9/11 terror attacks were highly effective in terrorizing urban populations, since no one knew when another city might be struck, and with what means. But what of the vast suburbs, and what of rural America? Here kamikaze aircraft, poison gas and dirty bombs were hardly likely. But everyone in the country had a mailbox, and now that mailbox could become the delivery system for a deadly disease. Even the most humble and obscure person living in the most remote location could never be sure that a piece of junk mail in the letterbox had not brushed up against an envelope teeming with lethal anthrax spores. The most harmless daily routine, that of checking the mailbox, suddenly became a tense encounter with the world of biological warfare.

The anthrax attacks also provided a most welcome pretext for the Bush administration and the FBI to scale down and to slow down the ongoing probes into 9/11. The anthrax letters provided a reason to re-assign FBI agents to the new danger, before they got anywhere near unearthing the explosive secrets of 9/11. On October 10, FBI assets were shifted away from the 9/11 investigation with the explanation that they were needed for the anthrax emergency.

At the same time the anthrax attacks, if properly regarded, can become the Achilles heel of the entire 9/11 operation, since it is here that the cause and effect relationship reaching into the secure weapons labs and military facilities of the US federal government is the most obvious. Anthrax cannot be synthesized by a bunch of rag-heads in a distant cave. Weaponized anthrax can only be obtained at the US Army's biological weapons facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and at a very few other centers of the same type controlled by other governments. The existence of weaponized anthrax is ipso facto a strong case for US government collusion in terror attacks on this country.

The anthrax cases also provide a case study in FBI obstruction of justice. After the anthrax letters were used as a pretext for paring down the 9/11 searches, the agents so re- assigned accomplished virtually nothing. For a long time the bureau pretended that any microbiologist could have been the killer. But the pool of potential anthrax suspects was of course much smaller -- it numbered in the dozens, or less. But, in order to define a realistic suspect pool, the FBI would have had to admit that the most likely source of the anthrax attacks was the government labs themselves, and that was something the FBI clearly did not want to do, lest this revelation be projected backwards onto 9/11. After a while Stephen Hatfill, a supposedly disgruntled former biowar researcher with a sinister resume and opinions, and thus a probable diversionary scapegoat, was identified as a person of interest. He was vilified by FBI leakers, but never indicted. The FBI made a Potemkin show of an investigation by draining a pond near Frederick, Maryland, but Hatfill was never charged.

We may also note in passing that the US government response to the anthrax cases pointed up the extent of oligarchical stratification in this society. Bush and the White House staff started taking Cipro, an antidote to anthrax, before the attacks even started. Members of Congress and congressional staffers got Cipro as soon as anthrax letters were found on Capitol Hill, and their offices were shut down instantly. In the case of black postal workers, the Postal Service expected them to keep working in tainted facilities, while at the same time there was a marked reluctance to give out free Cipro to these workers. The head of the USPS, a Bush appointee, said that any criticism o fhow he ran his agency amounted to aid and comfort for terrorists.

We cannot exclude the hypothesis that the anthrax cases were intended to become a much larger epidemic, one that might have claimed thousands of lives rather than just a few. Finally, in the anthrax cases, we have a prima facie case for political targeting. The first recipients of anthrax letters were a tabloid newspaper which had been prominent in publicizing the disorderly and at times illegal conduct of Bush 43's two substance- abusing daughters. Other recipients, like Senators Daschel and Leahy, were possible sources of opposition to the Patriot Act and other liberticide measures demanded by Bush and Ashcroft.

Between October 10 and October 11, just one week after the first case of anthrax had been reported, the FBI contacted the University of Iowa in Ames, Iowa. For seventy years this university had maintained a comprehensive repository of samples of every known strain of anthrax pathogen. This university was furthermore the source which provided samples of anthrax pathogen to researchers seeking cures, and also to labs seeking to weaponize the pathogen. Immediately after this phone call by the FBI, the University of Iowa destroyed the Ames anthrax repository. While it is not difficult to imagine the cover stories the FBI might have used to obtain this result, it is also clear that the Ames repository could have been the key to definitively solving the anthrax letters case. Analysis of the anthrax spores in the letters by chemical and DNA techniques identified these spores as belonging to the Ames strain. With the help of the samples collected in the repository, it would have been possible to identify with great precision the specific batch from which the anthrax letters had been filled, along with a paper trail leading to the agency to which the sample had been transferred. As the New York Times reported:

Shortly after the first case of anthrax arose, the FBI said it had no objection to the destruction of a collection of anthrax samples at Iowa State University, but some scientists involved in the investigation now say that collection may have contained genetic clues valuable to the inquiry.

Criminal investigators have not visited many of the companies, laboratories, and scientific institutions with the equipment or capability to make the kind of highly potent anthrax sent in a letter to Senator Tom Daschle, the majority leader. Where investigators have conducted interviews, they often seemed to ask general questions unlikely to elicit new evidence, several laboratory directors said.

Evidence Disappears

Last month, after consulting with the FBI, Iowa State University in Ames destroyed anthrax spores collected over more than seven decades and kept in more than 100 vials. A variant of the so-called Ames strain had been implicated in the death of a Florida man from inhalation anthrax, and the university was nervous about security. Now, a dispute has arisen, with scientists in and out of government saying the rush to destroy the spores may have eliminated crucial evidence about the anthrax in the letters sent to Congress and the news media.

If the archive still existed, it would by no means solve the mystery. But scientists said a precise match between the anthrax that killed four people and a particular strain in the collection might have offered hints as to when the bacteria had been isolated and, perhaps, how widely it had been distributed to researchers. And that, in turn, might have given investigators important clues to the killer's identity.

No matter how scientifically illiterate they might be, the reflex response of any real detective would be to veto the destruction of anything remotely resembling evidence, or even of a key to interpreting evidence. But this time around, the FBI was pleading ignorance. According to Bill Tobin, a former forensic metallurgist who had worked at the infamous and scandal-ridden FBI crime laboratory in Washington DC, "The bureau was caught almost as unaware and unprepared as the public was for these events. It's just not realistic to ask 7,000 agents to overnight become sufficiently knowledgeable about bioterrorist agents [sic] and possible means of theft of those items and how they might be disseminated lethally to an American public."

Dr. Martin Jones, an anthrax expert at Louisiana State University, commented: "If those cultures were still alive they could have helped in clearing up the muddied history" of the spores found in the letters. Ronald M. Atlas, the president-elect of the American Society of Microbiology, the world's largest group of "germ professionals," saw large legal implications in the destruction of evidence. "Potentially," he said, "it loses evidence that would have been useful" in the legal investigation. (New York Times, "Experts See FBI Missteps Hampering Anthrax Inquiry," November 11, 2002) The FBI was obviously out to sabotage its own investigation. Here is yet another case of manifest obstruction of justice by the FBI molehill. The 9/11 commission ignores both the anthrax affair overall and the obstruction of justice by the FBI.

Starting about a week after 9/11, anthrax letters began to arrive at the offices of The Sun, a supermarket tabloid based in Florida, of Senators Daschle and Leahy, NBC News, and the New York Post. On October 5, Bob Stevens, photo editor of The Sun, died of anthrax. A number of postal workers in Washington DC also succumbed. A total of five people died. The anthrax spores found in the letters were the product of very sophisticated milling, and were coated with a chemical, silica, that is unique to US laboratories, Iraqi anthrax, by contrast, is coated with bentonite, a mixture of silica and aluminum.

A great deal of publicity was given to a series of reports by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a former government official and microbiologist at the State University of New York who was also working for the Federation of American Scientists. Rosenberg's work was enthusiastically supported by the Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI), and the radical ecologists of Greenpeace. The FBI orchestrated a series of derogatory leaks about Rosenberg, suggesting that a gang/counter-gang operation might be in progress. Rosenberg's basic thesis was that the anthrax attacks were the work of a disgruntled lone assassin who had once worked for the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, near Frederick, but had subsequently been laid off. Naturally, the lone assassin approach tended to rule out an action by a more extensive network of moles in the federal government, which seems much more probable. Whenever extremely complicated and demanding operations are attributed to a disgruntled loner, we should be on guard against disinformation fabricated by the intelligence community. For example, the terrorizing impact of the anthrax letters was vastly increased by their synchronization with the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Was this a mere coincidence, or did the authors of the anthrax operation have advance knowledge that 9/11 was coming? How could Hatfill have been able to coordinate his supposed actions with 9/11? Once again, the rogue networks of the invisible government, and not any disgruntled loner, emerge as the prime suspects.

And there were other disinformation operations. Former CIA Director James Woolsey, a neocon who worked for a law firm representing Achmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, began a vigorous campaign to blame the anthrax attacks on Iraq. In addition, an anonymous letter was sent to police, apparently in September, accusing an Egyptian- born American scientist who had been laid off by USAMRIID of being a terrorist. The FBI questioned him and said that he was innocent. Details of the letter have not been released. Rosenberg thought it likely that this letter had been sent by the perpetrator.

According to Rosenberg's January 2002 statement,

The FBI has surely known for several months that the anthrax attack was an inside job. A government estimate for the number of scientists involved in the US anthrax program over the last five years is 200 people. According to a former defense scientist the number of defense scientists with hands-on anthrax experience and the necessary access is smaller, under 50. The FBI has received short lists of specific suspects with credible motives from a number of knowledgeable inside sources, and has found or been given clues (beyond those presented below) that could lead to incriminating evidence. By now the FBI must have a good idea of who the perpetrator is. There may be two factors accounting for the lack of public acknowledgement and the paucity of information being released: a fear that embarrassing details might become public, and a need for secrecy in order to acquire sufficient hard evidence to convict the perpetrator.

As for the anthrax, Rosenberg agreed that there was no doubt that the spores came from a US government lab:

All letter samples contain the same strain of anthrax, corresponding to the AMES strain in the Northern Arizona University database (which has been used for identification) Contrary to early speculation, there are no more than about 20 laboratories known to have the Ames strain. The names of 15 of these have been found in the open literature. Of these, probably only about four in the US might possibly have the capability for weaponizing anthrax. Those four include both US military laboratories and a government contractor.

Rosenberg based these conclusions on a technical analysis of the anthrax spores:

The extraordinary concentration (one trillion spores per gram) and purity of the letter anthrax is believed to be characteristic of material made by the optimal US process. The optimal US weaponization process is secret -- Bill Patrick, its inventor, holds five secret patents on the process and says it involves a combination of chemicals. There is no evidence that any other country possesses the formula. Under the microscope, the letter anthrax appears to be unmilled. Milled anthrax spores are identifiable because they contain debris. The optimal US process does not use milling. The Daschle sample contains a special form of silica used in the US process. It does not contain bentonite (used by the Iraqis). A "coating" on the spores in the letter sample, indicative of the secret US process, has been observed.

Rosenberg's thesis was that the sender of the anthrax letters had been familiar with a study about using a scenario of this type for a terror attack which had been conducted by anthrax weaponization expert Bill Patrick of USAMRID a couple of years earlier:

A classified report dated February, 1999 discusses responses to an anthrax attack through the mail. The report, precipitated by a series of false anthrax mailings, was written by William Patrick, inventor of the US weaponization process, under a CIA contract to SAIC. The report describes what the US military could do and what a terrorist might be able to achieve ... the report predicted about 2.5g of anthrax per envelope (the Daschle letter contained 2g) and assumed a poorer quality of anthrax than that found in the Daschle letter. If the perpetrator had access to the materials and information necessary for the attack, he must have had security clearance or other means for accessing classified information, and may therefore have seen the report and used it as a model for the attack.

Rosenberg offered the following portrait of the anthrax killer: "Insider in US biodefense, doctoral degree in a relevant branch of biology; Middle-aged American; Experienced and skilled in working with hazardous pathogens, including anthrax, and avoiding contamination; Works for a CIA contractor in Washington, DC area; Has up-to-date vaccination with anthrax vaccine; Has clearance for access to classified information; Worked in USAMRIID laboratory in the past, in some capacity, and has access now; Knows Bill Patrick and has probably learned a thing or two about weaponization from him, informally; Has had training or experience in covering evidence; May have had an UNSCOM connection; Has had a dispute with a government agency; Has a private location where the materials for the attack were accumulated and prepared; Worked on the letters alone or with peripheral encouragement and assistance; Fits FBI profile; Has the necessary expertise, access and a past history indicating appropriate capabilities and temperament; Has been questioned by FBI." (Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, "Analysis of the Source of the Anthrax Attacks," January 17-31, 2002)

During the autumn of 2001, the FBI blanketed central New Jersey with leaflets showing a sample of the anthrax killer's handwriting. The FBI also sent questionnaires to 32,000 US microbiologists, most of whom worked in fields that had nothing to do with the government's anthrax labs. This was clearly busy work designed to avoid making the government the prime suspects in the attacks. George Monbiot of The Guardian mocked this farce as "kind of 'investigation' which might have been appropriate for the unwitnessed hit and run killing of a person with no known enemies. Rather than homing in on the likely suspects, in other words, it appears to have cast a net full of holes over the entire population." Monbiot reported that he had telephoned an FBI spokesman about this issue. "Why, I asked, when the evidence was so abundant, did the trail appear to have gone cold? 'The investigation is continuing,' the spokesman replied. 'Has it gone cold because it has led you to a government office?' I asked. He put down the phone." Monbiot speculated that the reticence had to do with covering up US violations of international biowarfare treaties, since "the army's development of weaponized anthrax, for example, directly contravenes both the biological weapons convention and domestic law. So does its plan to test live microbes in 'aerosol chambers' at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, also in Maryland. So does its development of a genetically modified fungus for attacking coca crops in Colombia, and GM bacteria for destroying materials belonging to enemy forces. These, as the research group Project Sunshine has discovered, appear to be just a tiny sample of the illegal offensive biological research programmes which the US government has secretly funded. Several prominent scientists have suggested that the FBI's investigation is being pursued with less than the rigour we might have expected because the federal authorities have something to hide. The FBI has dismissed them as conspiracy theorists. But there is surely a point after which incompetence becomes an insufficient explanation for failure." (The Guardian, May 21, 2002)

This would appear to have been Barbara Hatch Rosenberg's line as well. In a sympathetic profile in the March 18, 2002 New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann reported that Rosenberg believes that the American bioweapons program, which won't allow itself to be monitored, may be in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons convention. If the anthrax attacks were the work of a lone, disgruntled, mad scientist, the case for strengthening international safeguards would be enhanced. Rosenberg's basic demand was that this program be monitored. Fair enough, but not the whole story.

Towards the end of June, 2002 the FBI obtained a search warrant to examine the Maryland home of Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, 48, a bio-defence researcher who had worked at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Hatfill said at once that he was the victim of a witch-hunt. When he lived in Rhodesia, Hatfill once studied close to a school which bears the same name as the bogus address on the envelopes containing the fatal doses of anthrax. (The Guardian, June 28, 2002)

On July 2, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof referred to Hatfill as "Mr. Z" and strongly suggested that the FBI should jail him as the anthrax terrorist. "If Mr. Z were an Arab national, he would have been imprisoned long ago. It's time for the FBI to make a move: Either it should go after him more aggressively, sifting thoroughly through his past and picking up loose threads, or it should seek to exculpate him and remove this cloud of suspicion." In essence, the FBI did neither.

Kristof and the other journalists hostile to Hatfill claimed that in the late 1970s, Rhodesian special forces attacked black-owned farms with anthrax, and sought to link Hatfill to these attacks. Hatfill held a press conference on August 12, 2002 in which he once again denied everything. In late August 2002, a paid two-page advertisement in the Washington Times argued that the anthrax killer had to be a member of the US military, probably someone with access to the U.S. off-budget, secret biological-warfare laboratories, or else someone with access to the Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) report on anthrax-mailing. The author of the ad was a certain Pete Yelis. Yelis asserted that Steven Hatfill was not the perpetrator. Yelis maintained that the evidence indicated that the mailings were probably prepared beginning two years earlier, and that the purpose was political -- to scare the U.S. into a domestic security/wartime response -- and not to kill a lot of people. He noted that the targets were among the strongest potential opponents of "Executive Branch/Homeland Security Wartime Powers expansions," citing, for example, the mailing to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). The SAIC report, which Yelis says contained "the exact specifications of the anthrax mailed" would suggest that the mailers came from a group of military officers with access to the SAIC report. (Washington Times, August 26,2002) A day earlier Hatfill and his lawyer held a second press conference, which received exceptionally broad media coverage, denouncing the FBI and Attorney General John Ashcroft for the tactics used in their investigation.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, after having been interviewed by the FBI, said that the agents had asked repeatedly whether a team of government scientists could be trying to frame Hatfill. "They kept asking me did I think there might be a group in the biodefense community that was trying to land the blame on Hatfill," she told the press. (Washington Times, August 3, 2002)

Whatever the gyrations of the FBI, it was clear that the anthrax came from the US government, and that the FBI had deliberately flubbed the investigation. The pond draining of 2003 changed nothing in this picture. By the summer of 2004, it was evident that the FBI would never solve the anthrax case because it did not want to awaken the US population to the reality that terrorism can come, and indeed does come, not out of a distant cave, but out of a US government lab on a military base. As for Hatfill, he was most probably a fall guy. If the FBI was incompetent before 9/11, and incompetent in its first major test thereafter, what then is the likely truth value of the statements made by the FBI about 9/11 itself?

THE WASHINGTON DC AREA SNIPER

In the fall of 2002, a series of sniper murders once again immersed the Washington DC area in fear and terror. These started in Montgomery County, Maryland, and soon spread south into Virginia. Here again the suspect pool was defined as snipers, and snipers are trained by the military services and certain police units. Any competent investigation would have started with lists of snipers trained by the government, especially recently retired or disgruntled ones. But this would once again have made the government into the prime suspect, and again the FBI refused to do this. The investigation was supposedly placed under the control of Montgomery County police chief Charles Ramsey, who ignored the imperative of sifting through the sniper pool, and instead acted as if the shooters could have been any casual passerby. Ramsey announced that telephone tip lines were being set up, and that he would rely on information from the citizenry to catch the felons. Weeks went by. After every sniper attack, road blocks were set up to encircle the entire surrounding area, but nothing was ever found. Local radio stations featured interviews with trained snipers who argued that real snipers were humanitarians who would never fire on unarmed civilians. Finally information arrived which permitted the identification of the vehicle used by the shooters, who were caught while sleeping at a rest stop on I-270. Sure enough, the older of the two shooters had been trained as a sharpshooter by the US Army. He and his younger partner were quickly categorized as lone itinerant psychopaths. This affair served to terrorize the national capital area, including Congress, the Supreme Court, and the executive departments, for the best part of two months. It refreshed and revived the horror generated by 9/11, and provided the immediate backdrop for the November 2002 election. That time around, al Qaeda and its mythical apparatus were not needed.

CHAPTER XI: INSIDER TRADING, CELL PHONES; MI-6 AND MOSSAD

A week after 9/11, the Institute for Counter Terrorism (ICT, also cited in some reports as the International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism), located in Herliya, Israel, called attention to very suspicious patterns of insider trading in put options (options to sell stock) in the shares of United Airlines and American Airlines, two companies whose planes were involved in the 9/11 attacks. Entitled "Black Tuesday: World's Largest Insider Trading Scam," the article was written by Don Radlauer. According to Radlauer's research, there was a 9,000% increase in United Airlines (UAL) put options between September 6 and September 10. Put options trading in UAL stock went up to 285 times the normal daily average on the Thursday before 9/11. American Airlines witnessed a 6,000% increase in put options in comparison to the usual average. In addition, there was a sharp rise in short interest in the shares of brokerage houses that had offices in the World Trade Center. Put options on Morgan Stanley went up to 27 times the usual level, and shorts of Merrill Lynch jumped to 12 times normal. This was accompanied by unusual buying of 5-year US Treasury notes, US government securities which are considered among the safest instruments for asset protection in case of some large world catastrophe.

Put options represent bets that a given stock will decline in value in a specific time frame. If the stock goes down, the trader who buys put options will rack up a profit. Selling the stock of a company short is a way to attempt to profit from the expected decline of the stock. The CBS broadcast Sixty Minutes commented on September 19 that "the afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the US stock options market." Bloomberg Business News remarked on September 20 that "this could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you've ever seen in your life ... this would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it were a coincidence."

It is widely assumed that the CIA tracks all important stock transactions, including the sensitive area of put options, in real time. The San Francisco Chronicle soon reported that a "source familiar with the United trades identified Deutsche Bank Alex Brown, the American investment banking arm of the German giant Deutsche Bank, as the investment bank used to purchase at least some of these options." (Marrs 90) Alex Brown (A.B. Brown), supposedly the oldest investment bank in the US. Alex Brown had been swallowed up by Bankers Trust in 1997. Alex Brown had numerous CIA connections. Until 1998, the chairman was A. B. "Buzzy" Krongard, who left in that year to become counselor to CIA Director George Tenet. On March 26, 2001, Krongard received an important promotion within the CIA. (Marrs 90)

The US Securities and Exchange Commission pledged to get to the bottom of this question, and so did the German Bundesbank, the central banking authority of that country. But all references to 9/11 insider trading soon disappeared from the press. The finance oligarchs were not interested in pursuing this investigation, which appeared by its very nature to undercut the official version of 9/11. The 9/11 commission was eager to liquidate the entire matter in a few mendacious lines:

Highly publicized allegations of insider trading in advance of 9/11 generally rest on reports of unusual pre-9/11 trading activity in companies whose stock plummeted after the 9/11 attacks. Some unusual trading did in fact occur, but each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation. For example, the volume of put options -- investments that payoff only when a stock drops in price -- surged in the parent companies of United Airlines on September 6 and American Airlines on September 10 -- highly suspicious trading on its face. Yet, further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11. A single US-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific US-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades. These examples typify the evidence examined by the investigation. The SEC and the FBI, aided by other agencies and the securities industry, devoted enormous resources to investigating this issue, including securing the cooperation of many foreign governments. These investigators have found that the apparently suspicious consistently proved innocuous. (9/11 commission 498 note 130)

Here is yet another example of the 9/11 commission begging the question. The issue is not whether the 9/11 commission's alleged "single US-based institutional investor" had "no conceivable ties to al Qaeda." It is rather whether such an investor had inside foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaeda, after all, is an organization of patsies whose primary role in the entire affair is to distract attention from the underlying realities of the case. We must conclude once again that the 9/11 commission is lying.

CELL PHONE CALLS?

In the first days and weeks after 9/11, phone calls made by passengers of the hijacked jetliners to persons on the ground played a central role in the fabrication of the official version of 9/11. If the 9/11 commission had been serious, it would have published a complete compendium of the phone calls made by 9/11 victims, with complete transcripts and complete recordings where available. The phone calls should have been thoroughly investigated to determine their authenticity. This is one of the many obvious things which it was the plain duty of the 9/11 commission to do, but which it refused to do. Instead, the 9/11 commission has relied on fragmentary hearsay evidence for the contents of the calls, which it has then used without any process of evidentiary evaluation to shore up its 9/11 story.

The assembling, collating, and evaluation of the entire canon of alleged 9/11 phone calls is a task which goes beyond the scope of the present study, and which needs to be tackled in a separate and comprehensive effort. The alleged Barbara Olsen telephone call, which loomed so large during the first week after 9/11, presents many contradictions; these have been discussed by Gerhard Wisnewski. The main difficulty with the reported Barbara Olsen phone calls is that the sole source is Theodore Olsen, the Solicitor General of the United States and a central figure in an aggressive and reactionary clique which played a key role in the Clinton impeachment and other destabilization operations against the legal government. This was again the same Olsen who had instructed 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) Without attempting to set forth the numerous internal problems presented by the available version of the Barbara Olsen phone calls, we can safely disregard this material as very dubious hearsay evidence from an entirely unreliable source.

Other phone calls present mutual contradictions. As Woody Box has pointed out, the two American 11 flight attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney allegedly each made a separate phone call to report the ongoing hijacking. Ms. Ong talked about hijackers spraying mace, but Ms. Sweeny did not. Ms. Sweeny reported seeing a bomb with yellow wires, which Ms. Ong did not mention. Are the two flight attendants reporting events as seen in different parts of the plane, or are the calls fakes, simulated by well-trained imposters working for intelligence agencies as part of the general orchestration of 9/11? These are important questions, but too much questions of opinion to be considered here.

In conformity with the methodology employed in this study, we rather need to ask if there is anything about the reported 9/11 victims' phone calls which takes us beyond the realm of opinion and into that of physical-technical impossibility. The answer to this is at least a provisional and partial yes: there is persuasive evidence that cell phone calls from planes flying above about 8,000 feet would have been intermittent at certain times, and totally unfeasible at others.

The 9/11 commission report never inquired as to whether cell phone calls can be made from planes at any altitude. It therefore conveys the notion that cell phones would work fine at 10,000 feet, at 20,000 feet, or 30,000 feet, and would allow conversations of several minutes or more in length. Some of the 9/11 phone calls may have been made with GTE Airphones, the telephones typically installed in the seat back in from of each passenger. These required credit cards for activation, and would have been reasonably reliable at most altitudes and in most locations. Other 9/11 phone calls were almost certainly made with cellular wireless telephones. Whether these cell phones could have been used or not on 9/11 in some of the ways described is subject to serious question.

CELL PHONE CALLS NOT FEASIBLE OVER 8,000 FEET

Airlines banned the use of cell phones a number of years ago because the cell phone signals interfered with the navigation systems of their aircraft. For this reason, many people have never tried to use cell phones while traveling in planes. If they did, they might be surprised to find that their cell phones do not work very well, or do not work at all. Professor Michel Chossudovsky contends that "given the prevailing technology in September 2001, it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to place a wireless cell call from an aircraft traveling at high speed above 8,000 feet.

One expert quoted by Chossudovsky comments: "Wireless communications networks weren't designed for ground-to-air communication. Cellular experts privately admit that they're surprised the calls were able to be placed from the hijacked planes, and that they lasted as long as they did. They speculate that the only reason that the calls went through in the first place is that the aircraft were flying so close to the ground. ("Will They Allow Cell Phones on Planes?, by Christopher Elliott ) Just after 9/11, Alexa Graf a spokeswoman for AT&T, told a reporter: "It was almost a fluke that the [9/11] calls reached their destinations ... From high altitudes, the call quality is not very good, and most callers will experience drops. Although calls are not reliable, callers can pick up and hold calls for a little while below a certain altitude." ("Final Contact," by Betsy Harter)

Further doubts were raised about the slovenly and duplicitous methods of the 9/11 commission just a few days after its final report was released in late July 2004. This occurred when American Airlines and Qualcomm announced that they would, in the near future, be able to offer consumers a new wireless technology that would permit airline passengers to use their cell phones while aloft in a commercial airliner. The very fact that this event was placed in the future as of July 2004 was irrefutable real-world evidence that it had not generally been possible in the past, for example in September 2001. (See "American Airlines and QUAL COMM Complete Test Flight to Evaluate In-Cabin Mobile Phone Use" )

This innovation was notable enough to attract the attention of the press. One paper commented: "Travelers could be talking on their personal cell phones as early as 2006.Earlier this month [July 2004], American Airlines conducted a trial run on a modified aircraft that permitted cell phone calls." (Washington Post, July 27, 2004) Aviation Week described the new technology as follows:

Qualcomm and American Airlines are exploring ways for passengers to use commercial cell phones in-flight for air-to-ground communication. In a recent 2-hour proof-of-concept flight, representatives from government and the media used commercial Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) third-generation cell phones to place and receive calls and text messages from friends on the ground.

For the test flight, which took off from Dallas-Fort Worth, an airliner was fitted out with antennas in the front and rear of the cabin to transmit cell phone calls to a small in-cabin CDMA cellular base station. This "pico cell" transmitted cell phone calls from the aircraft via a Globalstar satellite to the worldwide terrestrial phone network. (Aviation Week, July 20, 2004) Needless to say, neither this service, nor the associated third generation hardware, nor the pico cell CDMA base station inside the cabin (which functions as the equivalent of a cell phone communication tower inside the plane) was operational in September 2001.

According to aviation communications experts, the crucial consideration in determining whether the cell phone calls could have been made is the altitude of the aircraft at the time. Once a plane reaches 8,000 feet, which often occurs just a few minutes after takeoff, cell phone calls are in general not feasible. Professor Chossudovsky concludes that, "given the wireless technology available on September 11, 2001, these cell calls could not have been placed from high altitude." The only way passengers could have gotten through to family, friends, and authorities using their cell phones is if the planes were flying below 8,000 feet. And even at low altitudes of below 8,000 feet, cell phone communication is of poor quality. The crucial question is therefore: at what altitude were the planes traveling, when the calls were placed? The details provided by the 9/11 commission on the altitude of the airplanes are fragmentary, but there is no blanket contention that the planes were consistently traveling at low altitude. On the contrary, the 9/11 commission report seems to indicate that a considerable number of the cell phone calls were placed while the planes were traveling at altitudes above 8,000 feet, which is generally the maximum altitude for cell phone transmission. (Michel Chossudovsky, "More Holes in the Official Story: The 9/11 Cell Phone Calls.") Professor Dewdney has arrived at similar conclusions. Here is yet another area where the 9/11 myth and the 9/11 commission report collide with the boundaries of physical reality and possibility.

MI-6 AND MOSSAD

9/11 was carried out primarily by a US-centered rogue network or invisible government faction, but it was not carried out alone. The foreign intelligence service which contributed the most indirect support to 9/11 was unquestionably the British MI-6. The cooperation and interpenetration of the Anglo-American intelligence agencies is so overwhelming and so thoroughly institutionalized that it is hardly noticed by US commentators. The CIA and MI-6 are virtually Siamese twins sharing a number of vital organs. This fact is much deplored by those of us who believe that the British Crown, the City of London, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Oxford Circus (the London home of MI-6) are among the most baneful factors influencing American national life, but it is by now a well-established and entrenched fact. Whatever is known to the US National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, is known simultaneously to the British GCHQ at Cheltenham, by virtue of bilateral intelligence sharing agreements. Some light has been thrown on this phenomenon by Claire Short, when she reported that the red boxes sent to her by the UK intelligence service contained texts of private conversations of Kofi Annan which had been bugged by the Anglo-Americans. GCHQ has also had a recent whistle-blower who has fleshed out other parts of this picture. Many of these arrangements go back to World War II, and they have never been abrogated. The British functioned as the junior partners of the US invisible government during the Iran-contra affair, and they continue to do so today. In addition, although the British may be the junior partners in terms of military assets and disposable resources, they are often very much the senior partner when it comes to developing strategies and plans. Who could know the Arab and Moslem worlds better than the British orientalists? The overall Anglo-American plan for the balkanization of the Middle East, the Bernard Lewis plan, is really a distillation of two centuries of historical experience by the British Arab Bureau and the British India Office. The extraordinarily close US-UK alliance lets the British side do what it wants within institutional channels, discretely, and silently. If we were to detail the extent of British participation in the history of NATO state- sponsored terrorism, in the Afghan guerilla movement against the Soviets, in the foundation of al Qaeda, in the development of the figure of Bin Laden (who once reportedly kept a pied-a-terre in the London suburb of Wembley) in the role of London as the premier world center of Islamic fundamentalism and of other terrorism, and a host of other subjects, we would essentially have to re-write almost this entire book from a slightly different point of view. There can be in short no doubt that the main supporting role in 9/11 was played by British intelligence and British assets generally.

CIA and MI-5/MI-6 have also practiced a certain division of labor. Although congressional and parliamentary oversight is usually derisory, there is always the chance that an investigation may reveal embarrassing secrets. Therefore it has sometimes seemed advantageous to have the CIA undertake certain tasks in the UK, and to have MI-6 do certain jobs in the US -- precisely to avoid the problem of legislative oversight in the country whose territory was being violated. During World War I and World II, the British were happy to run operations designed to get the US embroiled in war -- operations which were welcomed by the Wall Street finance oligarchy. In 1976, by contrast, CIA Director George Bush was implicated in a campaign to overthrow the Labour Party government of Britain by helping to orchestrate a series of scandals. (Tarpley 1992 internet edition) This campaign was part of a transatlantic effort to install the unspeakable Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister.

The Israelis, by contrast, have never wanted to accept the reciprocity of intelligence sharing which the British have more or less instituted. Israel is far less willing to share its state secrets than the British have been. The result has been that the Israelis have had to work hard to purloin the kind of US secrets which the British have obtained as a matter of course. The archetypal British deployment in this regard occurred when they staffed their Washington Embassy with Kim Philby, Donald MacLean, and Guy Burgess. The British got the information they wanted, and some of it even ended up in Moscow and Beijing -- thanks to these three dedicated triple agents of the British Crown. This trio had some close scrapes, but they never saw the inside of jail. The Israelis, by contrast, had to rely on US Navy civilian employee Jonathan Pollard, who was found out in the mid-1980s and sentenced to life in prison, where he still remains despite pleas on his behalf by Netanyahu. British espionage can use the existing channels set up by treaties and agreements; the Israelis have to improvise networks informally as they go along, which can often be more risky.

Perhaps this is why the more picaresque stories of foreign intelligence involvement in the US during 2001 tend to focus on the Israelis. One such episode involved five Israeli moving men who were arrested on 9/11 after cavorting on a New Jersey rooftop while they were filming, with evident jubilation, the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

According to Haaretz, they "were arrested after they went up on the: roof of a building and posed grinning for photographs with the burning towers in the background. Police found a large amount of cash in their car and suspected them of being members of a terrorist group." They were later charged with living and working in the US without permits and were ordered deported. The five were held for more than two months in a Brooklyn prison. Israeli Ambassador David Ivry, Richard Clarke's friend, claimed they were being held under poor conditions. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two New York Congressmen worked to secure their release. When the men were arrested, they all had two sets of passports, one Israeli and one European, prompting the law enforcement authorities to consider them Mossad agents and apparently suspects in the 9/11 attacks. In addition, An Israeli drug gang was rounded up shortly after the 9/11 attacks. One of the gang leaders, whose apartment was two blocks from the WTC, was arrested when he refused to evacuate his apartment in the emergency. Drugs, cash, and guns were discovered in his apartment, and he was arrested, as were his accomplices. (Haaretz, October 29, 2001)

The five moving men were finally deported, according to the New York Times of November 21, 2001. According to this report, "The five were asked to take polygraph tests before being allowed to leave. But Paul Kurtzberg refused on principle to divulge much about his role in the Israeli Army or subsequent work for people who may have had ties to Israeli intelligence." Kurtzberg's attorney, Steven Noah Gordon, said that his client and the others had all finally agreed to the polygraph exams. One of Kurtzberg's interrogations lasted seven hours. The other four Israelis were Oded Ellner, Omer Gavriel Marmari, Sivan Kurzberg, and Yaron Shmuel. Two additional Israelis were detained in Cleveland, both of whom had just completed their service in the Israeli Defense Forces. At least 50 Israelis were detained after 9/11, with arrests reported in San Diego, Houston, Kansas City, St. Louis, New York, and Cleveland. (New York Times of November 21, 2001)

At the time of 9/11, Israeli intelligence was clearly in an aggressive mode. Mexican authorities arrested two Israeli men on October 10, as they attempted to enter the Legislative Palace in Mexico City. The two men were armed with 9-mm pistols, nine grenades, explosives, three detonators, and 58 bullets. The two men, Salvador Gersson Smike and Sar Ben Zui, were wrestled to the ground by a group of Mexican workers, and were then detained by the Mexican Attorney General's office. (Cronica de Roy, October 13, 2001)

MEGA

In January 1997, the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted a phone conversation between an Israeli official at the embassy in Washington, and Danny Yatom, the head of the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service. The official wanted permission from the spy boss to "go to Mega" in order to procure a copy of a confidential letter that had been sent by then-U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, containing US assurances about a recently negotiated agreement for an Israeli military withdrawal from the Hebron area in the West Bank. Yatom, according to the NSA intercept, rejected the request, admonishing his agent, "This is not something we use Mega for." (Washington Post, May 7, 1997) A name mentioned in relation to the Mega scandal was that of Leon Fuerth, Vice President Albert Gore's national security adviser, and a fanatical supporter of the Likud. The Washington Post, in a 1998 profile of Fuerth, reported that he had been under suspicion by US intelligence officials of delivering sensitive US policy information to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud. Why was the Mega issue dropped? In March 1999, British author Gordon Thomas asserted in his book entitled Gideon's Spies that Israel had blackmailed the Clinton Administration with a threat to release tapped telephone conversations between the President and Monica Lewinsky. In her testimony before independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Lewinsky had reported that the President had warned her, on March 29, 1997, at the height of the Mega hunt, that he suspected the White House telephones were being tapped by agents of an unnamed foreign country.

THE CARL CAMERON REPORTS, DECEMBER 2001

US public attention was focused on Israeli intelligence activities by a series of three news features by Carl Cameron in mid-December 2001. Cameron had received detailed information from Washington sources. At the time of this report, Cameron said that 60 Israelis were still being held by US authorities. As many as 140 Israelis had been arrested, including many before the 9/11 attacks. According to Cameron, many of the Israelis "stated they served in military intelligence, electronic surveillance intercept and/or explosive ordnance units." The Israelis, some of whom were "described as active Israeli military or intelligence operatives, have been detained on immigration charges or under the new Patriot Anti-Terrorism Law," Cameron reported. According to this report, there was "no indication the Israelis were involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance and not shared it." On this sensitive issue, a highly placed investigative source told Fox News there were "tie-ins," but refused further details. "Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified, cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It is classified information," the source said. An Israeli Embassy spokesman offered categorical denials, and said any suggestion of Israelis spying on or in the United States is simply not true. Another group of Israelis in North Carolina was suspected of keeping an apartment in California to spy on a group of Arabs whom the U.S. authorities were investigating for links to terrorism. It was further reported that numerous US government agencies were part of a working group that had been compiling evidence in the case since the mid-1990s. The probe had documented hundreds of incidents in cities and towns across the country; the investigators had concluded that this extensive pattern might "well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity." Many Israelis detained claimed that they were art students from the University of Jerusalem or Bezalel Academy. These self-styled Israeli art students often sought to make contact with US government personnel by saying they wanted to sell cheap art or handiwork. Cameron's documents indicated that these art students had "targeted" and penetrated military bases, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and dozens of other government facilities -- including even secret offices and unlisted private homes of law enforcement and intelligence personnel. Another phase of the investigation, said Cameron, had resulted in the detention and arrest of dozens of Israelis working at kiosks and pushcarts in American malls, where they had been selling toys called "Puzzlecar" and "Zoomcopter." These vendors had ceased their operations when press reports surfaced about Israelis being arrested for immigration violations.

A report obtained by Cameron from the General Accounting Office investigation which referred to Israel under the euphemism of "Country A" reported: "According to a U.S. intelligence agency, the government of country A conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the U.S. of any U.S. ally." A Defense Intelligence Agency report specified that Israel had a "voracious appetite for information .... The Israelis are motivated by strong survival instincts which dictate every fact of their political and economic policies." "[Israel] aggressively collects military and industrial technology and the U.S. is a high priority target." "Israel possesses the resources and technical capability to achieve its collection objectives," the DIA document concluded. (Carl Cameron, "Suspected Israeli Spies Held by U.S." Fox News, Dec. 11-14, 2001)

AMDOCS

Another of Cameron's installments dealt with the role of the Israeli-controlled company AMDOCS in the installation of the new White House communications system during the mid-1990s. This issue had surfaced earlier. According to a May 2000 story in Insight magazine, the employees of an Israeli company had enjoyed almost unsupervised access to White House telephone lines and other extremely sensitive communications equipment. The Insight article, entitled "FBI Probes Espionage At Clinton White House," reported that FBI counterintelligence investigators were probing an Israeli operation to spy on top U.S. officials through hacking into secure telephone networks. "More than two dozen US intelligence, counterintelligence, law-enforcement and other officials have told Insight that the FBI believes Israel has intercepted telephone and modem communications on some of the most sensitive lines of the U.S. government on an ongoing basis," the story said, specifying that the investigation involved eavesdropping on calls to and from the White House, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and the State Department. According to Insight, the FBI was tracking an Israeli businessman working for a local phone company, whose wife was suspected of being a Mossad officer working out of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Federal agents searched the businessman's office, and found a list of the FBI's most sensitive phone numbers, including "black" lines used for wiretapping. "Some of the listed numbers were lines that the FBI used to keep track of the suspected Israeli spy operation," said Insight. Authorities were alerted to this operation by a phone manager who became suspicious about the activities of a subcontractor working on phone-billing software and hardware designs for the CIA; the subcontractor was employed by an Israeli-based company. Insight reported that the means of spying involved a private company which provides record-keeping software and support services for major phone companies in the United States. Insight quoted an anonymous US government source as saying, "It is a politically sensitive matter. I can't comment on it beyond telling you that anything involving Israel on this particular matter is off-limits. It's that hot." Insight did not name this firm as AMDOCS, but Cameron later supplied the name.

Cameron reported that, over the previous year and a half, the FBI had been investigating Bell Atlantic and the telecommunications billing company AMDOCS of Chesterfield, Missouri. According to Cameron's sources, a senior-level employee of AMDOCS had a separate TI data phone line running directly from his St. Louis offices to Tel Aviv. Cameron noted that AMDOCS had the contracts with the 25 largest telephone companies in the United States to handle their directory assistance, calling record and billing work, which in effect gave AMDOCS real-time access to every telephone in the US, including records of all phone calls. According to Cameron, AMDOCS had been investigated on several occasions by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, for suspected ties to the Israeli Mafia, as well as to espionage. In 1999, the National Security Agency issued a TOP SECRET/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information report, warning that US phone records were getting into the hands of foreign governments -- specifically the Israeli government. US authorities were especially concerned about the possibility that the Israeli Mafia was monitoring their communications traffic. One reason for this concern was a 1997 incident in which FBI, Secret Service, DEA and LAPD telecommunications were "completely compromised by Israeli organized crime," using precisely the data streams supervised by AMDOCS. In this instance, a major Federal and local investigation of an Israeli-linked organized-crime ring, trafficking in cocaine and ecstasy, had been thwarted, because "the bad guys had the cops' beepers, cell phones, and even home phones under surveillance." Investigators concluded that AMDOCS may have been the source of the information.

And AMDOCS was not the only Israeli company with access to White House communications. The London Sunday Times had reported in the spring of 2001 that Israeli intelligence agents had used Telrad, a company subcontracted by Nortel to develop a communications system for the White House, to tap data flowing from the White House. These data were copied into a secret Israeli computer in Washington and then transferred to Tel Aviv two to three times a week. According to this report, Israel had intercepted e-mails from President Clinton as a result of this operation. Telrad was Israel's leading telecommunications company, and began by supplying phones to the Israeli Ministry of Communications in 1951. In 2001, Telrad provided "secure communications systems for the Israeli Defense Forces," according to the website of its major parent company, Koor Industries. Koor owned 80% of Telrad; the other 20% was owned by Nortel. Nortel itself was reported to be in a marketing partnership with Comverse. (London Sunday Times, May 21, 2000)

Comverse was Comverse Infosys, an Israeli-controlled company which provided "wire tapping equipment for law enforcement." Using Comverse software, law enforcement agencies employ computers to tap into the elaborate nationwide system of telephone switchers and routers, routing the targeted phone conversations into the computers of investigators authorized to do the wiretaps. Comverse managed and maintained the computers and the software, giving Comverse potential access to all of the data. Fox reported that "Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were both warned October 18th in a hand delivered letter from 15 local, state, and federal law enforcement officials, who complained that "law enforcement's current electronic surveillance capabilities are less effective today" than they were before Comverse was brought in under new US federal legislation. In Israel, Fox reported, Comverse worked so closely with the government that the Ministry of Industry and Trade (formerly headed by Ariel Sharon) paid 50% of the firm's research and development costs. Fox added: "But investigators within the DEA, INS and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue, or even suggest Israeli spying through Comverse, is considered career suicide." Fox reported that the FBI center at Quantico, Virginia handled the government contracting and purchasing of the wiretap equipment and, "for years they have thrown much of the business to Comverse. A handful of former US law enforcement officials involved in awarding Comverse government contracts over the years were then hired to work for the company. Numerous sources say some of those individuals were asked to leave government service under troubling circumstances. What troubles investigators most is that in some cases in New York, certain suspects altered their behavior dramatically right after supposedly secret wire taps had begun, and this caused grave concern that they were tipped in advance." (Fox News, Dec. 13, 2001)

COMVERSE INFOSYS

Fox linked the Israeli spy operation to September 11, saying that "U.S. investigators digging into the 9/11 terrorist attacks fear that suspects may have been tipped off to what they were doing by information leaking out of AMDOCS." This segment dealt with another Israeli high-tech company, Comverse Infosys, which furnished wiretapping equipment for U.S. law enforcement. Under a 1994 law, private telecommunications and computer companies were required to make their network of switchers and routers available to law enforcement for wiretapping. Some investigators believed that Comverse electronic eavesdropping equipment had a "back door" through which wiretaps could be intercepted by unauthorized parties. One source said that the standing joke among U.S. law-enforcement agents was that their wiretaps were going directly to Tel Aviv.

Secretary of State Colin Powell commented on the Israeli arrests at a State Department briefing held on December 13:

Reporter: There were 60 Israeli citizens who have been picked up in the post- September 11 sweep, many of whom, if not all of whom, are connected to Israeli intelligence .... Are you concerned about such intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and have you taken up this issue with your counterpart in Israel?

Powell: I'm aware that some Israeli citizens have been detained, and I've been in touch with the Israeli government as to the fact that they have been detained in making sure that they have rights of access to Israeli diplomatic personnel here in the United States. With respect to why they are being detained, and the other aspects of your question, whether it's because they are in intelligence services or what they were doing, I will defer to the Department of Justice and the FBI to answer that, because, frankly, I deal with the consular parts of that problem, not the intelligence or law-enforcement parts of that problem.

The Israeli Embassy in Washington offered its usual blanket denial of any Israeli espionage in the US. Pro-Israeli pressure groups mobilized in the wake of the Carl Cameron broadcasts in an effort to suppress this highly embarrassing and suspicious news. Among the most active was a group called CAMERA ("Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America"), which launched an e-mail, fax, and phone call campaign, to force Fox TV to drop its probe of the Israeli espionage scandal. Fox soon caved in, and no more reports were broadcast. Fox had also removed the transcripts of Cameron's reports from its website by the end of December 2001.

In the fall of 2002, the German liberal weekly Die Zeit of Hamburg returned to the question of Israeli espionage in the US before 9/11. This paper concluded that "between December 2000 and April 2001 a whole horde of lsraeli counter-terror investigators, posing as students, followed the trails of Arab terrorists and their cells in the United States. In their secret investigations, the Israelis came very close to the later perpetrators of September 11. In the town of Hollywood, Florida they identified the two former Hamburg students and later accused terror pilots Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi as possible terrorists. Agents lived in the vicinity of the apartment of the two seemingly normal flight school students, observing them around the clock." According to Die Zeit, "the Israelis provided a list including the names of at least four of the 19 hijackers of September 11, but this was apparently not treated as sufficiently urgent by the CIA and therefore not passed on to the FBI." According to this account, the US agencies dawdled and temporized, and then reacted with annoyance when the massive presence of Israeli espionage was discovered. Two who were on the alleged Israeli list were Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, both supposedly on American 77, the plane the government claims hit the Pentagon. (Die Zeit, October 1, 2002) The Israelis doubtless knew a great deal in advance, but they can always point to their pro forma warning to the US government that an attack was imminent.

Adding up these reports, we can conclude that Israel maintained a massive and illegal espionage operation in the US, spying on all phases of American life, from the White House and the federal agencies through the business world to the foot traffic in shopping malls. Israel minutely observed the Atta-Shehhi-Jarrah-Hanjour patsy operation, and the Israeli government formally warned the US about it. The central contention coming out of the Carl Cameron reports is once again that "U.S. investigators digging into the 9/11 terrorist attacks fear that suspects [meaning the 19 alleged hijackers] may have been tipped off to what they were doing by information leaking out of AMDOCS." Naturally, this evaluation presupposes the validity of the official version which is contested and rejected here. If the 19 patsies were working under the direction of a faction of the US invisible government, as is contended here, what could the role of the Israelis have been? Could the Israelis have functioned as a cutout, allowing certain kinds of communication between the US mole network and the patsies? This is possible, but there is no compelling reason to assume it. The very serious matters of Israeli agents of influence in the US government attempting to co-determine US policy towards Iran and other countries, urgently raised by the FBI investigation of Larry Franklin as an Israeli mole in the Pentagon in late August 2004, is discussed in the closing chapter.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz later reported that, about two hours before American 11 hit the North Tower, two employees of the Israeli company Odigo who worked in Herzliya, Israel, had received an email message warning that terror attacks in New York City were imminent. Odigo was an internet instant messaging service. The message had been sent through Odigo's instant messaging. Odigo had offices in New York City about two blocks from the World Trade Center. The full text was never made public. (Haaretz, September 26, 2001) The FBI was informed of this message, but, true to form, did nothing. The last press references to the Odigo warnings came in late November 2001. The 9/11 commission ignored this matter.

CHAPTER XII: CONSPIRACY THEORY: THE GREAT AMERICAN TRADITION

The neocons, who are themselves a conspiracy, do not like conspiracy theories. But if we look at actual American history, we find conspiracy theories everywhere, even in the most exalted places. The neocon hysteria about conspiracy theories is therefore radically anti- historical, like so much else about this ideological and fanatical faction.

As the Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn convincingly argues in his prize-winning study, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), the American Revolution was based on a conspiracy theory which saw the individual actions of George III as all being governed by a singly unifying design, which was to impose tyranny on the UK's North American colonies. This theory had been learned by some among the founding fathers from such British political figures as Edmund Burke, who made similar allegations themselves in a slightly different context. As Bailyn points out, the notion of a conspiracy centered on George III and his court was shared by the broadest spectrum of the founding fathers, from firebrand revolutionaries to cautious right-wingers like Dickinson.

Before the United States ever existed, there was a conspiracy theory. According to Bailyn, the Americans of the eighteenth century

... saw about them, with increasing clarity, not merely mistaken, or even evil, policies violating the principles upon which freedom rested, but what appeared to be evidence of nothing less than a deliberate assault launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty both in England and in America. The danger in America, it was believed, was in fact only the small, immediately visible part of the greater whole whose ultimate manifestation would be the destruction of the English constitution, with all the rights and privileges embedded in it. This belief transformed the meaning of the colonists' struggle, and it added an inner accelerator to the movement of opposition. For, once assumed, it could not easily be dispelled: denial only confirmed it, since what conspirators profess is not what they believe; the ostensible is not the real; and the real is deliberately malign. It was this -- the overwhelming evidence, as they saw it, that they were faced with conspirators against liberty determined at all costs to gain ends which their words dissembled -- that was signaled to the colonists after 1763; and it was this above all else that in the end propelled them into Revolution. (Bailyn 95)

This conception was endorsed by George Washington in the Fairfax. Resolution of 1774, written in collaboration with George Mason. Here Washington asserted the existence of a "regular, systematic plan" of oppression. In conformity with this plan, the British government was "endeavoring by every piece of art and despotism to fix the shackles of slavery upon us." Washington wrote in a letter of this time that "beyond the smallest doubt ... these measures are the result of deliberation ... I am as fully convinced as I am of my own existence that there has been a regular, systematic plan formed to enforce them." (Bailyn 120)

Thomas Jefferson agreed; he wrote in a pamphlet of 1774 that although "single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day ... a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery." (Bailyn 120) This language prefigures the final text of the Declaration of Independence.

John Adams estimated in 1774 that "the conspiracy was first regularly formed and begun to be executed in 1763 or 4." At other times Adams traced the conspiracy back to the 1750s and the 1740s, mentioning in this context Governor Shirley of Massachusetts. According to Adams, the proponents of the conspiracy were exchanging letters that were "profoundly secret, dark, and deep;" this was a part of what Adams called a 'junto conspiracy." (Bailyn 122) According to the Boston Committee of Correspondence, one of the most important pre-revolutionary institutions, awareness of the conspiracy was a gift of divine providence, practically a revelation. They thanked God who had "wonderfully interposed to bring to light the plot that has been laid for us by our malicious and invidious enemies." (Bailyn 122) For these colonists, God was a conspiracy theorist.

Even the Tories, the pro-British faction among the colonists, believed in a conspiracy theory of their own. In 1760 the royalist Governor Bernard of Massachusetts alleged that a "faction" had organized a conspiracy against the customs administration; he saw this group as a secret, power- hungry cabal. (Bailyn 151 )

As Bailyn sums up his exhaustive reading of the pamphlet literature and political writings of the time, "the conviction on the part of the Revolutionary leaders that they were faced with a deliberate conspiracy to destroy the balance of the constitution and eliminate their freedom had deep and widespread roots -- roots deeply embedded in Anglo-American political culture .... The configuration of attitudes and ideas that would constitute the Revolutionary ideology was present a half-century before there was an actual Revolution ... and among the dominant elements in this pattern were the fear of corruption -- of its anti-constitutional destructiveness -- and of the menace of a ministerial conspiracy. At the very first signs of conflict between the colonies and the administration in the early 1760s the question of motivation was openly broached and the imputation of secret purposes discussed ... The conviction that the colonies, and England itself, were faced with a deliberate, anti-libertarian design grew most quickly where the polarization of politics was most extreme .... But in some degree it was present everywhere; it was almost universally shared by sympathizers of the American cause ... The explosion of long-smoldering fears of ministerial conspiracy was by no means an exclusively American phenomenon. It was experienced in England too " (Bailyn 144-145)

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE: CONSPIRACY THEORY

The US Declaration of Independence signed in Congress in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, is one of the most celebrated conspiracy theories of all time. Here we read towards the beginning a description of the present situation of the states which notes that

... when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security ....

This is followed by a long catalogue of misdeeds and abuses committed by the British monarch, introduced by the refrain: "He has ...." At the end of the catalogue, there is a summary paragraph which makes clear that what has been presented should not be thought of as a laundry list of complaints about disparate events, but rather as the implacable and systematic operations of a concerted plot -- of a conspiracy. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, as edited by Benjamin Franklin and others:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having, in direct object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States.

The ministers changed, the policies shifted, but the controlling goal of tyranny remained. It is a conspiracy theory of the type which would make many a modern academic or neocon talk show host squirm. It is also one of the greatest political documents of world history. Were Jefferson and Franklin paranoids, mere conspiracy buffs?

It is perfectly correct to say that the United States as a country was founded on conspiracy theory, one which served as a powerful unifying ideology for the entire revolutionary generation. The approach of their analysis, it should be noted, was empirical as well as analytical: they recognized the need to back up their conspiracy theory with an abundant supply of factual material. This point of documentation and intelligibility is a key point, which the analysts and researchers of today need to remember.

Abraham Lincoln often serves as a kind of touchstone of morality and legitimacy in American politics, and he generally deserves this distinction. For progressives as well as traditionalists and conservatives (as distinct from right wing radicals and neofascist neocons), the notion of getting right with Lincoln has long been a fixture of American political thinking.

What would Lincoln do if he were confronted -- as we are today -- with the attempt to found an entire system of government upon a set of uncorroborated assertions about a certain violent event which has aroused hysterical passions and which has been seized upon by those in power to set off an unjust and aggressive war of conquest? Instead of speculating as to what Lincoln might have done, let us look at what he actually did do.

For Lincoln was, in his youth, confronted with a situation very much like our own after 9/11 and the beginning of continuous warfare.

SPOTTY LINCOLN

For the young Lincoln, the question regarded the James K. Polk administration's policy towards Mexico. Polk was a slaveholder and a proto-Confederate who wanted to expand US territory towards the south in such a way as to increase the power and influence of the slave bloc. Polk was willing to make sweeping territorial concessions to the British in regard to the disputed Oregon Territory, where he repudiated the famous "fifty-four forty or fight" slogan in favor of a rotten compromise. By contrast, Polk's entire administration was devoted to tireless efforts to embroil the US in an aggressive war with Mexico. Polk first sent an envoy named Stockton to meet with the leaders of Texas, urging them to start a conflict with Mexico which the US could then portray as a new outrage perpetrated by the dictator Santa Anna. But Sam Houston wisely rejected this proposal, and would not act as Polk's provocateur. The best study of this attempt is Glenn W. Price's The Origins of the War with Mexico: The Polk-Stockton Intrigue ( 1967), and it can be shown to those who assert that conspiracies do not exist. Here was one which tried to provoke war but failed.

Later, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to take a military force across the Nueces River to the Rio Grande. The international border between Texas and Mexico was then about halfway between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. When Taylor's forces got to the present site of Brownsville, Texas on the northern bank of the Rio Grande, they marched across Mexican farms and into the middle of a Mexican township located there. This inevitably led to fighting in which some of the US troopers were killed. Polk then used this incident as a pretext for extorting a declaration of war from the US Congress: after all, US troops had been killed by Mexicans on US soil! The Mexican War of 1846-1848 was on. The armed clash provoked by Polk became the 9/11 tocsin for the Mexican War. The pressure on any politician to go along with Polk's orchestrated incident was as great as today's pressure to go along with the 9/11 myth.

In the midst of the war hysteria, some of the better Americans of the age refused to go along. One was Henry David Thoreau, who went to jail rather than pay a special surtax connected with the conflict. Former President John Quincy Adams led a group of antislavery northeastern Whigs called the Immortal Fourteen who voted against Polk's supplemental budget request to fund the army in the field.

Abraham Lincoln in early 1848 was an obscure Illinois Whig and admirer of Henry Clay who had just arrived in Washington to begin serving his term as a member of the US House of Representatives. We are dealing here not with Lincoln the war president who saved the union, but rather with Lincoln as a member of the opposition during another war -- the Mexican War. Polk's 1848 State of the Union address was a defense of the administration's policy in regard to Mexico. This was the first major speech that Lincoln heard after being sworn in as a congressman. Polk was an earlier president who could never admit to having been mistaken:

... the great bulk was his justification in detail, page after page, of every one of the actions of the United States, and the Polk administration, in the war with Mexico. The most salient quality of this long presentation was its relentless self-righteousness. Its total defensiveness. Polk and America were always and in every regard in the right; Mexico was always and in every way in the wrong. Doubly wrong: Mexico was not just the aggressor who started the war; Mexico was also wrong in every point leading up to that beginning, and had been wrong at every point since. And now Mexico was further wrong in not agreeing swiftly to her own dismemberment -- to the "liberal" and "generous" terms that we are now offering. (Miller 164)

It was under these circumstances that the young Illinois congressman offered his famous series of Spot Resolutions -- demanding to know from Polk exactly where, in what spot it had been on American soil that the bloodshed had taken place -- with the obvious overtone that the fighting had not taken place on US territory at all, but in an area long settled by Mexicans and belonging to Mexico. Lincoln made a speech in favor of his Spot Resolutions on December 22, 1847, after just ten days in the House. Lincoln hammered away at these same issues in later speeches on January 12 and again on January 22, 1848.

The January 22 speech portrayed Polk as a provocateur, and demanded that he tell the truth about what had happened:

Let him answer, fully, fairly, and candidly. Let him answer with facts, and not with arguments. Let him remember he sits where Washington sat, and so remembering, let him answer, as Washington would answer. As a nation should not, and the Almighty will not, be evaded, so let him attempt no evasion -- no equivocation. If the president cannot or will not give the desired answers ... then I shall be fully convinced, of what I more than suspect already, that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong -- that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.

Lincoln argued that Polk had been determined all along to find a pretext for war with Mexico; Polk had proceeded

... by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory -- that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood -- that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy -- he [Polk] plunged into it, and has swept, on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself, he knows not where.

Lincoln did not hesitate to attack Polk personally, nor to advance doubts about his mental state:

How like the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream is the whole war part of his late message! ... His mind, tasked beyond its power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature on a burning surface, finding no position, on which it can settle down, and be at ease ... As I have said before, he knows not where he is. He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man. God grant that he may be able to show, there is not something about his conscience, more painful than all his mental perplexity!

Lincoln was convinced that the attempt to assign Polk's plots, lies and provocations such a central role in American public life was destined to have terrible consequences, and in this he was amply justified. The Mexican War and its aftermath, built upon Polk's falsehoods, precipitated the crisis that led directly to the Civil War. But before that Lincoln paid a considerable personal price for his principled stand in favor of truth. For his adversaries, he became "Spotty Lincoln," who had refused to support Polk's rationale for the war. Some Democratic editors referred to Lincoln as a Benedict Arnold.

One who baited Lincoln in such terms was Senator Steven Douglas, the Illinois Democrat who was later one of Lincoln's four opponents in the 1860 presidential election. At the very first of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, held at Ottawa, Illinois, Douglas spoke of Lincoln in these terms: "Whilst in Congress he distinguished himself by his opposition to the Mexican War, taking the side of the common enemy against his own country [voice from audience: That's true"] and when he returned home he found the indignation of the people followed him everywhere, and he was again submerged or obliged to retire into private life, forgotten by his former friends [voice from audience: "And will be again"]."

Lincoln never gave up his principled position about Polk's method of engineering the war. When Lincoln received the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, he was asked to assemble a short campaign autobiography or autobiographical sketch for use in the campaign. Here it would have been easy to omit all mention of the Spot Resolutions, but Lincoln obviously felt that the question of truth was more important. He stood his ground in the 1860 sketch, arguing that

... the act of sending an armed force among the Mexicans was unnecessary inasmuch as Mexico was in no way molesting, or menacing the US or the people thereof, and ... it was unconstitutional, because the power of levying war is vested in the Congress, and not in the President.

On this point, Lincoln never wavered. Many scholars and biographers who otherwise admire Lincoln have been puzzled or even scandalized by his tenacity on this issue. What Lincoln saw, and which the scholars often do not see, was the fatally pernicious consequences of lies in public life. In this sense, as in so many others, Lincoln was the anti-neocon. Lincoln also knew that if provocations were allowed to pass unchallenged, executive rule by provocation and by the threat of provocation would soon be the result. As he wrote to his friend Herndon on February 15, 1848:

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose -- and you allow him to make war at pleasure .... Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars (Miller 164-191)

These examples from the life of Abraham Lincoln suggest that, if he were alive today, our greatest president would hardly have accepted the fantastic myth of 9/11 in the way that most current politicians have done. Lincoln would have been at the very least a skeptic in regard to the official version and its many fallacies. He might well have been sympathetic to the 9/11 truth movement, since it is this movement which has stood up for the best of traditional American values against the overbearing oppression of the much- repeated lie. All of the neocon arguments about the need to stifle domestic dissent in time of war fall to the ground when confronted with the example of Lincoln.

THE PARANOID STYLE

Objections to the 9/11 imposture in its official version are often dismissed as conspiracy theories. Supporters of the official version use this a term of contempt, even though it is clear that to label a point of view as a conspiracy theory is in no way to refute it. The charge or insult of conspiracy theory is not only demagogical, but also intellectually dishonest, since the official version, involving as it does Bin Laden and al Qaeda acting at a distance from remote caves with the help of laptops, represents a conspiracy theory of a peculiarly fantastic type. Implicit in this procedure is the assumption that a conspiracy theory which is endorsed and embraced by the controlled corporate media is no longer a conspiracy theory, but rather respectable, and presumed true. Minority views which are not supported by the controlled corporate media remain conspiracy theories, and cannot be credible, no matter how true they can be shown to be. To these applies the warning issued by the deranged prevaricator in the White House:

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)

The entire controversy about conspiracy theory is a diversion, and is generally conducted in such a way as to lead away from the facts on the table. Charges of conspiracy theory represent in their own way a form of ideological terrorism, and grow out of the intellectual climate of cold war McCarthyite witch-hunts. Conspiracy itself has a history as long as humanity, since it is one of the primordial forms of political action. Machiavelli writes about conspiracy in a long chapter of his Discourses; what he means by conspiracy is a plot to kill a ruler and to seize power in his place, like the conspiracy organized by the Pazzi family against the Medici in the 1480s. Conspiracy is also an active category of the Anglo-Saxon common law.

Conspiracy theory as a term of opprobrium is relatively new. It dates back to the work of Richard Hofstadter of Columbia University. Hofstadter was himself a kind of neocon ante litteram who became a direct beneficiary of McCarthyism: he took over a job vacated by Prof. Philip Foner, who had come under ostracism as a member of the Communist Party USA. In his essay on "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (1964) and in his other writings Hofstadter took issue with the 1880s-1890s prairie populist critique of international bankers, a critique which today seems prophetic in its foreshadowing of the destructive shenanigans of Lord Montagu Norman of the Bank of England during the interwar period (Norman was part of Brown, Shipley in London, the home office of Prescott Bush's Brown Brothers, Harriman in Wall Street) and of the International Monetary Fund during the entire postwar period. But for Hofstadter, radical critics of Anglo- American finance oligarchy were paranoids. His essay is doubly suspect because it appeared in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, and seemed to suggest that the many critics of the Warren Commission report were also -- paranoids. An interesting problem was posed for Hofstadter in that sophisticated western Europe, where populist paranoia was supposedly less strong, was even more critical of the Warren Commission report than was the alleged US citadel of paranoia.

Hofstadter's favorite habit of tarring political forces he did not like, such as the populists, with the brush of paranoia appears illegitimate. The paranoid typically fears that there is a conspiracy afoot specifically against himself. For Hofstadter, this notion becomes impossibly broad: anyone who thinks he sees a conspiracy anywhere is ipso facto a paranoid. What is lost here is the necessary reference point in reality: is there a conspiracy going on or not? US Attorneys have been proving the existence of conspiracies to juries for a long time, and they have generally escaped the charge of paranoia.

It is impossible to write political history without admitting from time to time the possibility of confidential agreements for concerted action made in advance. There are of course times when conspiracy plays no role: an absolute tyrant at the height of his power has no need of conspiracy; he can act directly by issuing orders. (Yet even here, even figures like Hitler and Stalin turn out to have been less absolute than usually assumed; it is enough to think of Hitler's chronic need to keep an eye on his Gauleiters, or the fact that the USSR functioned as an oligarchy during more years of its history than it did as a tyranny.) Similarly, an absolutely spontaneous mob -- a rarity, although a theoretical possibility -- is also innocent of conspiratorial planning. Between these two extremes, some form of surreptitious concerted action can frequently be found. As has been stressed throughout this book, US society today is neither a tyranny nor a democracy; it is organized from top to bottom according to the principle of oligarchy or plutocracy. The characteristic way in which an oligarchy functions is by means of conspiracy, a mode which is necessary because of the polycentric distribution of power in an oligarchical system, and the resulting need to secure the cooperation and approval of several oligarchical centers in order to get things done. Furthermore, the operations of secret intelligence agencies tend to follow conspiratorial models; this is what a covert operation means -- oordinated and preplanned actions by a number of agents and groups leading towards a pre-concerted result, with the nature of the operation remaining shielded from public view. So, in an oligarchical society characterized by the preponderant role of secret intelligence agencies -- such as the United States at the beginning of the twenty- first century -- anyone who rules out conspiracies a priori runs the risk of not understanding very much of what is going on. One gathers that the phobia against alleged conspiracy theory in much of postmodern academia is actually a cover story for a distaste for political thinking itself.

"Conspiracy theorist" as an all-purpose term of ad hominem argument to dismiss arguments which cannot be refuted thus goes back to the years after the Kennedy assassination, when the public was expected to accept that it was US government policy that this great crime, along with the further assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, would remain permanently unsolved, and that those who objected would be vilified.

A more recent hue and cry against so-called conspiracy theory has been raised by the neocon academic Daniel Pipes, doubtless a nepotistic close relative of the Richard Pipes who was a prominent member of Bush 41's exercise in anti-Soviet alarmism, Team B. Pipes is a neo- McCarthyite who harasses academics who show sympathy for the Palestinian cause through his witch-hunting Campus Watch organization. He was also a beneficiary of a recess appointment to the board of the United States Institute of Peace, a procedure to which Bush 43 resorted when it became apparent that the US Senate would never approve Pipes. Pipes' book, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (1997) defines conspiracy theory as "the fear of a nonexistent conspiracy," as well as a form of political pornography. But what if the conspiracy exists? For Pipes, ones own ignorant prejudice that no conspiracy exists trumps anything that might be determined by empirical research. Pipes relies frequently on his interpretation of Occam's razor, the nominalist proposition that explanations should be kept simple, or more precisely that theoretical entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem). In the hands of Pipes, this becomes an infallible all-purpose argument in favor of lone assassins over multi-member plots, since a lone assassin approach is always more economical than a conspiratorial group. But what if necessity, which even Occam mentions, dictates something more complicated to account for the effects observed? Pipes and his friend Gerald Posner, who has written an especially meretricious book supporting the 9/11 myth, have no answer. There is one conspiracy which Pipes does believe in: he alleges an Islamist conspiracy to take over or destroy the United States. According to Pipes, one of the focal points for this conspiracy is the Committee for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which he thinks wants to impose Islamic law on this country. In any case, we can be certain that Pipes has learned all about conspiracies from his enthusiastic participation in the neocon mutual admiration and self- promotion society, which has been remarkably successful in making its banal and mediocre members into intellectual and political authorities.

LINCOLN'S HOUSE DIVIDED SPEECH: CONSPIRACY THEORY

Probably the most famous speech in American political history is the one which students still know as the House Divided Speech of 1858. This is Lincoln's address to the Illinois Republican Convention in the process of his nomination as candidate for the US Senate. Here Lincoln is dealing with a series of events which had greatly increased sectional tensions between north and south, between the slave and free states. These events included Stephen Douglas's sponsorship of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, an attempt to mandate squatter sovereignty on the question of slavery in the territories which had set off a severe round of violence on the part of free-staters and pro-slavery border ruffians. The pro-slavery forces had been helped by the policies of President Franklin Pierce, a doughface and an ancestor of Barbara Bush, the mother of the current tenant of the White House. These policies had been continued under President James Buchanan, another doughface or northerner who embraced the slave bloc for political reasons. Finally, there had been the infamous Dred Scott decision, written by the old Jacksonian Democrat Roger Taney, who had asserted that blacks could not be citizens, that they had no rights, and that federal limitations on slavery were illegal. Were these events, carried out over a period of several years by a heterogeneous group of protagonists, mere coincidence and happenstance, or did they possess an internal coherence and interrelation? Lincoln saw it as very likely that the events of the 1850s were the result of conspiracy:

We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen -- Stephen [Douglas, Senator and Democratic Party leader], Franklin [Pierce, US President, 1854-57], Roger [Taney, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, and author of the Dred Scott decision], and James [Buchanan, US President, 1857- 861], for instance -- and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill -- ... in such a case, we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood each other from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn before the first lick was struck.

Yes, the House Divided speech adumbrates a conspiracy theory. Nor was Lincoln the only founder of the Republican Party with a penchant for this form of analysis: a similar outlook can be found in the speeches of William Seward, the New York governor and senator who went on to serve as Secretary of State under Lincoln and Johnson. Seward was responsible for the 1860 campaign platform and key slogans of the Republicans. Seward needed a way to express distaste for the slavery-based southern society, along with resentment about the insatiable and inordinate power of the southern states over the federal government. He chose to do this while avoiding outright abolitionism. Seward's answer was the theory of the Slave Power Conspiracy, understood as the coordinated actions of the slave bloc designed to consolidate permanent power over the federal government. It was this slogan that helped to put Lincoln in the White House in 1860. Here the reference of conspiracy could not be more explicit. Any Republican of today who objects in principle to conspiracy theory should be reminded of the absurdity of his position, since his party rose on the basis of an overt conspiracy theory, expounded by leaders who were moral and intellectual giants compared to the pygmies of today.

As Eric Foner has shown in his work on the ideology of the early Republican Party, when the GOP prepared to contest the election of 1860, the new party needed a clearer ideological vision than it had possessed in 1856. On the one hand, the slavery issue loomed very large. On the other hand, the Republicans did not wish to make outright abolition in to their main slogan, for fear of a backlash in various states, including in the north. The central concept of the Republican Party in 1860 thus turned out to be the Slave Power Conspiracy. This theory saw the ruling slaveholder elite of the southern states as preparing to assert total control over the federal government in Washington, and thus threatening the freedom and the livelihood of every person in the north, whether they cared about slavery as an issue or not.

Thus, the United States was founded on a conspiracy theory. Abraham Lincoln's first important speeches in Congress were devoted to exposing a conspiracy by Polk and his friends to unleash the Mexican War. Lincoln's House Divided speech, the most celebrated political utterance in the chronicles of the US, adumbrates a conspiracy theory. The Republican Party itself first captured the presidency thanks to the efficacy of a conspiracy theory.

CHAPTER XIII: THE 9/11 MYTH: COLLECTIVE SCHIZOPHRENIA

The wily Shafts of state, those Juggler's tricks
Which we call deep Design and Politicks
(As in a Theatre the Ignorant Fry,
Because the Cords escape their Eye
Wonder to seethe Motions Fly) ...
Methinks, when you expose the Scene,
Down the ill-organ'd Engines fall;
Off fly the Vizards and discover all,
How plain I see thro' the Deceit!
How shallow! And how gross the Cheat! ...
Look where the Pully's tied above!
Oh what poor Engines move
The Thoughts of Monarchs, and Design of States,
What pretty Motives rule their Fates! ...
Away the frighted Peasants fly,
Scar'd at th 'unheard-of Prodigy ...
Lo, it appears!
See, how they tremble! How they quake!"
-- Jonathan Swift, "Ode to the Honourable Sir William Temple" (1689)

Received opinion in the United States has come to regard the official version of the events of 9/11, that is to say the 9/11 myth, as normal. Those who doubt the veracity of the official, mythical account are likely to be accused of being mentally imbalanced, and possibly paranoid. In this chapter, we will seek to turn the tables on the official mythographs and their gullible followers. We have already discussed some of the fantastic, contradictory, and absurd features of the official myth. We now turn our attention to the problem of why this myth has been accepted by so many people, especially in the English-speaking world. Our conclusion is that readiness to believe in the myth is correlated with a mental outlook which can only be described as schizophrenic and autistic. In other words, there is something more than fear and stress at work. The resulting outlook operates not just at the level of individuals, but also in the Anglo-American culture as a whole. To do justice to this dangerous but fascinating phenomenon, we must venture into the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis to develop a familiarity with some of the main features of schizophrenic and autistic thinking. This will allow us to evaluate the 9/11 myth as a product of troubled and clouded thinking, and will also shed light on the role of the main purveyor of the myth, G. W. Bush.

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," said Franklin D. Roosevelt at his inauguration in March, 1933. The advice of the Bush regime to the American people is, by contrast, "Be afraid! Always!" As we have seen, in the aftermath of 9/11 U.S. public life has come to be founded more and more upon an outright fantastic myth which is often invoked, but never demonstrated or proven. U.S. institutions have more and more built their foundations upon a provocation. The impact of the myth on American life and on the psychology of individual citizens has not been sufficiently studied by psychologists, since most of them also worship at the shrine of the myth. But in a general way, it is possible to see that the prevalence of the myth reflects a mass psychopathology of delusion and false consciousness, a turning away from reality into a politics of myth. The United States is well on its way under the second Bush regime to becoming an autistic power, estranged and alienated from surrounding reality. This poses the question: why does anybody believe the official story of 9/11, with all of its absurdities? What explains the power of the myth?

Countries which have chosen to build their polity upon myth have generally fared poorly. The classical example is of course German Nazism, whose leaders openly rejected reality in favor of a fantastic world of Germanic and Wagnerian heroes and monsters. The politics of modern Serbia, which has seen defeats dating back to the fourteenth century as more real and more relevant than the economic realities of today, are another example. Unless the 9/11 myth can be deconstructed and demystified, we will soon experience many more of the unpleasant effects of mythical politics here in the United States. The desperate expedient of turning to terrorism to deal with a crisis is like choosing to initiate a heroin habit to get through a rough patch of personal life, as Sanguinetti reminds us. A key aspect to consider, Sanguinetti argues, "in connection with a strategy which is founded upon provocation, is as old as the world: Seneca already remarked -- and if I quote him, it is because, being Nero's counselor, he was an expert in state terrorism and provocations -- that it is 'easier not to embark upon this path than it is to stop, once embarked upon it.' Like a drug, artificial terrorism needs and requires to be administered in always more massive and more frequent doses." (Sanguinetti 19) The problem, after all, is that terrorism -- like all kinds of murder -- will out, and open secrets cannot be kept forever. As Sanguinetti stresses, "the fragility of such artificial terrorism resides however in this: once you proceed with such politics, it becomes even more well-known, and therefore judged, and all that had constituted the strength of this politics now constitutes its weakness, whilst the great advantages it assured its strategists now turn into a major inconvenience." (Sanguinetti 40)

PLATO'S CAVE AND LOCKE'S SENSE CERTAINTY

In retrospect, 9/11 emerges as a made-for-television spectacle of death and destruction in which all plausibility is sacrificed for visual effectiveness on the screen. A half century ago, such an operation would have been much more difficult. Movies go back over 100 years. By 2004, the U.S. population had been addicted to the television screen for some 50 years; the younger generations had never known anything else. Computer screens had been around for 30 years. Finally, the vogue of video games had been strong for several decades. The result was that a world of flickering images projected on screens of various sizes and types had displaced experienced reality for many, or rather had become the centerpiece of their experienced reality. The computer enhancement of Hollywood films had further blurred the notion of what was real.

This was an old problem, the problem of sense certainty, appearing in a new form. It had been discussed by Plato in The Republic, in the celebrated passage of Book VII devoted to the cave. In the age of 9/11, Plato's cave was even enjoying a new revival of interest because of the way it had been crudely reflected in the movie The Matrix. Plato imagined ignorant and unenlightened humanity as confined to an underground cave, illuminated only by faint diffuse sunlight from the cave entrance and the light of a fire. Humanity sat tied and fettered, forced to stare at a blank rock face in front of them; they could not turn their heads. Behind them was a wall, and between the wall and the fire a walkway. Along the walkway came bearers of statues, effigies and other artifacts, holding them up above the wall so that their shadows were cast on the rock face in view of the fettered audience. The bearers supplemented their flickering shadowy show with sound effects as best they could, which echoed from the rock face. The fettered audience of course became convinced that the shadows on the rock face in front of them were the very substance of reality, and prided themselves on their knowledge of the various shadows and the order in which they usually appeared. If any of the fettered victims were brought into the sunlight, he would suffer unspeakable pain and take a long time to become accustomed to the light. If any of them who had been in the sunlight tried to explain the nature of the world above to the cave dwellers, he risked enraging them, and being torn to pieces.

This is Plato's figure for the predicament of mankind, always starting from a naive epistemology of sense certainty applied to the discrete manifold that is accessible to the senses. Because of the attractive power of sense certainty, most people do not want to advance from opinion, which deals with shadows and reflections, to the higher form of understanding, which deals with mathematical thinking, and to the highest faculty of reason, which seeks to clarify the good and the other Platonic ideas through the exercise of dialectical thought. But this is the path which those who love truth and reason, the philosophers, must attempt to tread.

In modern times, the ruler of the cave has been John Locke, the great codifier of English empiricism, with his doctrine that the mind is a blank slate, and that the entire content of the mind derives from the accumulation of sense impressions. Locke's sensationalism, itself borrowed from Paolo Sarpi of Venice, has been the key to the degradation of mental life in the English-speaking world for over three centuries. By comparison, the French Cartesian approach, although deeply flawed, has fared marginally better. The Leibnizian outlook has fared best, even though undercut by the most difficult of circumstances. This may be at least one of the reasons why mass gullibility in regard to 9/11 has been the greatest in the English-speaking world, while France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and other nations have all had either a best-selling book and/or a prime time nationwide television program devoted to a serious critique of 9/11. What we need to remember is that if Plato's cave were to be depicted for the modern world, it would have an endless video tape of the events of 9/11 projected on the rock face in front of the fettered cave inmates.

THE 9/11 MYTH AS MASS SCHIZOPHRENIA

Our thesis here is that the 9/11 myth represents a form of mass schizophrenia. It was designed in this form by the terrorist controllers, far from any Afghan caves, who actually planned and executed this project. The schizophrenia of the 9/11 myth is congenial to the mental outlook of Bush and the neocons, who have been the most energetic propagators of the myth. The mass broadcasting of the myth as a compulsory article of faith by numerous important institutions has clearly induced a schizophrenic shift in the collective psychology of the US population, and may well be generating individual cases of schizophrenia at an accelerated rate. Something in this direction has been suggested by Dr. John Gray, the celebrated author of Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, in his remarks to the International Inquiry on 9-11 held in Toronto at the end of May 2004.

The purpose of terrorism, of course, includes terror -- the chilling effect of fear which has already heavily impacted political speech, trade union militancy, and intellectual life. This is so obvious that it hardly needs to be commented upon. As all those who lived through it can remember, the shock of 9/11 was profound, and successfully paralyzed whatever real political life there was in the U.S. for more than two years, certainly until the Democratic primary contest began to heat up towards the end of 2003. The Democratic Party collapsed during 2002, and it is not clear that it has recovered to this day.

According to the distinguished psychoanalyst Dr. Justin A. Frank, M.D., Bush functions as a highly effective purveyor of fear and terror because he is gripped by real fear in his own subconscious. One cause of Bush's fear is the disintegration of his own personality, which is never far away. In this regard, Bush's "tightly held belief system shields him from challenges to his ideas -- from critics and opponents, but, more importantly, from himself. Just beneath the surface, it's hard not to believe that he suffers from an innate fear of falling apart, a fear too terrifying for him to confront .... He's appeared close to falling apart in public repeatedly; after wandering off the track while speaking, his statements disintegrate into often meaningless fragments until he finds his way, ends the discussion, or attacks the questioner." (Frank 64) In Frank's view, Bush also fears retribution, something which the public might associate with his fear of a Nuremburg prosecution for his crimes in the Iraq war, but which at a deeper level certainly involves 9/11 in some form: "the terror of which [Bush] promises to rid the world is in fact a different fear altogether: his intractable dread of his own individual punishment. And now that Bush has, in his grandiose imagination, identified himself with the entire nation, the nation has become the target for the personal retribution he feels is his due." (Frank 100) This would suggest that Bush's internal guilt, anxiety and stress may well have increased sharply in the wake of 9/11, and of Iraq. Dr. Frank's study Bush on the Couch, although eminently useful in many respects, does not discuss the evolution of Bush's pathologies over time, as for example in relation to the history of his administration. Frank also avoids the obvious implications of his findings for 9/11, which he seems to find too hot to handle.

At its root, the belief structure of the 9/11 myth is not a factual account of an historical, real-world event. Still less is it an example of euhemerism, in which real events are preserved in more or less distorted mythical form. The 9/11 myth is rather a collective psychosis of a paranoid schizophrenic type. Let us explore for a moment what this might mean. What is now referred to as schizophrenia was formerly known as dementia praecox; the change in terminology is due to Eugen Bleuler, who used it to describe not so much a split personality as a lack of coordination among various psychological functions. Bleuler was also the first to speak of the special quality of schizoid thinking, which he called autistic. Simple schizophrenia is marked by a reduction in external relations and interests; this may include a lack of curiosity. "Emotions are lacking in depth; ideation is simple and refers to concrete things ... and a retreat to simpler or stereotyped forms of behavior." Paranoid schizophrenia generally occurs in later life, and "is characterized primarily by unrealistic, illogical thinking, with delusions of persecution or grandeur, and often by hallucinations." In psychoanalysis, the description of schizophrenia emphasizes "regressive symptoms," seen as "a retreat to less mature levels of the ego (the reality-testing portion of the psyche)," along with attempts to replace the existing world, from which the patient has retreated, by such phenomena as hallucinations, delusions, fantasies of world reconstruction, and peculiarities of language." (Silvano Arieti, "Schizophrenia," Encyclopedia Britannica, 1971) The points of contact with Bush as the chief 9/11 fear-monger, and with the 9/11 myth, are manifold.

In this context, neocon utopian thinking, with its explicit "fantasies of world reconstruction," can be seen as a step towards schizophrenic thinking. One is reminded of the comments of retired Army Colonel Larry Wilkerson, who was serving as Colin Powell's chief of staff in the State Department, apropos of certain leading neocons. "I call them utopians," Wilkerson told a reporter. "I don't care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians, I don't like. You're never going to bring utopia, and you 're going to hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it." Wilkerson added that he had "a lot of reservations about people who have never been in the face of battle, so to speak, who are making cavalier decisions about sending men and women out to die. A person who comes to mind in that regard is Richard Perle, who, thank God, tendered his resignation and no longer will be even a semiofficial person in this administration. Richard Perle's cavalier remarks about doing this or doing that with regard to military force always, always troubled me." (Washington Post, May 5, 2004)

Thus, it is the mythographers and myth-mongers -- those who love to brand critics and skeptics as paranoids -- who are really the psychopaths. Chief among these is of course Bush 43 himself, who has functioned as the leading propagandist of the 9/11 myth, from a few days after 9/11 through the 2004 Republican National Convention and his fall re-election campaign. The thesis of this chapter is the existence of a destructive dialectic between the mass psychosis of 9/11 and the personal psychopathologies of Bush as a media presence. In this dialectical relationship, the mass psychosis and the individual pathologies of the (apparent) ruler become each other's simultaneous cause and effect. To make this clearer, let us turn to a discussion of the paranoid personality written twenty-five years before Bush became a fixture on the national scene: "The person most vulnerable to a persecutory paranoid state is the tense, insecure, suspicious person who has little basic trust in other persons, who has always found it difficult to confide in others, tends to be secretive, usually has few close friends, and is addicted to solitary rumination. These characteristics are sometimes hidden behind a facade of superficial sociability and talkativeness. Above all, there is a rigidity about such a person's thinking which becomes most obvious when he is under emotional stress. This may give an impression of certainty and self-assurance, but actually it is based upon profound insecurity, upon a need to be dogmatic because of an inability to tolerate suspended judgment." (Norman Alexander Cameron, "Paranoid Reactions," Encyclopedia Britannica, 1971 )

FRANK: BUSH AS MEGALOMANIAC AND SCHIZOPHRENIC

This reads like a psychological profile of George W. Bush, and is coherent with the lucid analysis of Bush's mentality given by Dr. Justin Frank in his recent Bush on the Couch. Frank describes Bush as a megalomaniac operating behind the hail-fellow-well-met affability of a small-town philistine booster of the Babbitt type. According to Frank, "a careful consideration of the evidence suggests that behind Bush's affable exterior operates a powerful but obscure delusional system that drives his behavior. The most precise psychiatric term to describe his pathology is most frequently used to identify a particular condition exhibited by schizophrenics that, as we'll see, has broader applications as well: megalomania. The psychological concept of megalomania refers as much to a mental attitude as to actual behavioral manifestations .... Freud calls megalomania a protective delusion of power and greatness that serves as a defense against fear, against paranoid anxieties." (Frank 200-201) Bush is thus that type of schizophrenic called a megalomaniac, and the 9/11 myth to which he has devoted his life is entirely coherent with his mentality. The 9/11 myth is in fact a massive attempt to impose schizophrenic and autistic thinking on the entire American and world public. This may explain why those who wish to rebel against the myth often tend to insist that Bush (or Cheney) had to have planned and directed every aspect of 9/11 personally and in advance. Even though Bush's limited mental equipment seems to rule this out, this reaction is humanly understandable, since Bush has been beyond any doubt the main propagandist of the 9/11 myth. So, to destroy the myth, it is often seen as necessary to blame the mythograph. The extent of Bush's actual responsibility is discussed elsewhere in this book, where it is asserted that Bush was probably not informed of the details in advance, but certainly embraced the demands of the perpetrators soon after the fact. In this sense, the insistence on blaming Bush is justified as a matter of political shorthand, if not of precise analysis and historical fact.

Dr. Frank writes about Bush 41's favorite technique of "evacuating" his fear onto the U.S. population, both for his own relief and better to terrorize the electorate. He also discusses Bush 43's penchant for projection. Here is another passage from the earlier discussion of this complex: "The paranoid patient gets rid of his intolerable sense of guilt through unconscious mechanisms of denial and projection. He denies his primitive hostile or erotic impulses and projects them -- that is, he ascribes them to other persons. Projection is rarely done at random. Usually the patient unwittingly selects, as the alleged carriers of his own impulses and his own guilt, persons who have correspondingly minimal unconscious trends." (Norman Alexander Cameron, "Paranoid Reactions," Encyclopedia Britannica, 1971) This fits well with what Dr. Franks writes about projection in Bush 43: Projection for Frank is "the primitive defense mechanism by which an individual endows others with his own negative attributes." (Frank 152) Applying this to the tenant of the White House, Frank finds that, "incapable of safely confronting the true extent of his own sadism, Bush had to project his sadism onto an enemy of his own creation -- one he entered the White House ready to demonize and destroy; one whose annihilation would serve to protect his own fragile, deluded sense of self." (Frank 115) As always, Frank is talking about Iraq, but, like most of his analysis, this applies just as well to Bin Laden and al Qaeda as it does to Saddam.

No thinking person can fail to have been impressed by the degree to which Bush, in his attempt to demonize Saddam Hussein, engaged in self-description. Saddam, Bush alleged, was an oppressor, a violator of international law, a leader in contempt of the international community, an aggressor -- all accusations which applied just as well or better to Bush himself. Joseph Gabel's comment is highly relevant: "... racist regimes, being generally insensitive to humor ... are, by contrast, keen on caricature, mainly in its crude forms ... The caricaturist, without realizing it, is really drawing himself ... Clearly the caricaturist sees his own essence. In this category of ideas, one could say that the sociocentric and ethnocentric caricature is the deranged perception of false consciousness." (Gabel 123-4 note) Frank calls attention to Bush's tendency for projection and description in regard to Saddam Hussein, although the same dynamics are at work in the portrayal of Bin Laden. According to Franks, "none of this has gone unnoticed by the public. Indeed, the pronounced parallels between Bush and Saddam may well have promoted a wider understanding of Bush's destructive self rather than hiding it. As suggested by the many circulating photos of Bush's face digitally merged with Saddam's image -- a computer trick that reveals a dramatic pictorial understanding of the process of projection -- satirists instinctively understand that there is a pot-calling-the- kettle-black aspect to the showdown between Bush and Saddam." (Frank 116) And, more to the point, between Bush and the supposed authors of the 9/11 attacks.

Part of Bush's guilt is almost certainly the fact that, while he probably was not aware of the full 9/11 plot before the fact, he became aware of most of it after that fact, most likely during the course of the day on September 11. Bush was the recipient of an ultimatum by the rogue network inside the US government which carried out the attacks, an ultimatum demanding that he go on television and denounce foreign terrorists for the attacks, and then proceed to implicate Bin Laden, al Qaeda, Afghanistan, and to wage the war of civilizations against the Arab and Moslem world which the plotters evidently desired. For these reasons, Bush's burden of guilt and dissembling must be very heavy indeed.

So much for preliminaries. When we enter the world of the 9/11 myth, we find ourselves on the terrain of mass psychosis, mass hallucination, mass delusion. The twentieth century has shown how powerful these ideological figments can be. This book proceeds from the standpoint of Platonic idealism; a Marxist might say that with 9/11, we enter the world of radically false consciousness, where the superstructure has become completely detached from social and material reality in a way that Marx never contemplated in his writings. A suggestive study that addresses precisely this complex of problems is Joseph Gabel's 1975 False Consciousness: An Essay on Reification. Gabel sees reification (hypostatization) as the making of people, ideas, and time into things. His point of departure is the gross fact of mass belief in ideological chimeras, specifically Nazi and Stalinist ideology. The 9/11 myth is of a piece with these.

GABEL: THE POLICE CONCEPT OF HISTORY

Gabel elaborates a lengthy definition of the political world view which is correlated with alienated and manipulated political life under the rule of schizophrenic/autistic ideologies which exhibit a low degree of fidelity to reality. Gabel called this the "police concept of history;" if he were writing today, he might well have called it the intelligence community or CIA theory of history. Gabel writes: "The police concept of history is the negation of the historical dialectic, in other words the negation of history .... History's driving force is not the ensemble of objective forces but good or evil individual action ... since the 'event' is no longer understood as the normal substratum of the course of History, but as miracle or catastrophe; it is no longer dependent on scientific explanation but on black or white magic. In the Manichean diptych of this view, the hero (leader) and the traitor represent two poles of the same principle of reificational negation of the autonomy of history. It is therefore a pseudo-history, a non-dialectical result either of success due to the genius of the leader or failure explicable through treason; an authentic 'syndrome of external action' permits the privileged system to evade eventual responsibility. The police concept of history represents the extreme form of political alienation; it is both a sociocentrism which dichotomizes the world into a privileged system [the US] and a non-privileged remainder [the Arab and Islamic world] and a phenomenon of consciousness of a schizophrenic nature. Since the privileged system is considered as perfect, extra-temporal and extra-dialectical, the event -- particularly the unfavorable event -- can only be explained by means of external action; it is experienced as an unexpected, 'undeserved' catastrophe, which is no longer integrated into the normal course of events whose succession constitutes the threat of concrete, dialectical temporality. One can compare this ensemble with the two specific elements in the clinical picture of schizophrenia, the syndrome of external action and the deranged experience of the end of the world (Weltuntergangserlebnis, abbreviated as WUE by German authors), the clinical translation of the appearance of the dialectic in a reified world which can accept the event only as a catastrophe." (Gabel 115-116, with my interpolations)

Here we have the principal elements or memes of the 9/11 myth in a clinical description a quarter century before the fact. The event has nothing to do with real historical forces. The realities of world commodity flows and of the world financial system in particular go out the window. Bin Laden and al Qaeda provide a deus ex machina of absolute evil and black magic. 9/11 is the undeserved catastrophe or WUE, experienced as a nightmare out of the blue. In order for such notions to gain mass acceptance, the American ideology had to already have traveled a considerable distance down the road towards schizophrenia and autism, and such mass acceptance has in turn further accelerated that descent. For Gabel, schizophrenia is a loss of contact with reality and with history. His definition of schizophrenia depends heavily on the notion that, for the schizophrenic, development over time has become incomprehensible, while relations in space have become all-important. In space we can often choose to move, but time does not permit this. Therefore there is a close relationship between a radically anti-historical view of the world, as for example among the neocons and the Bush regime, and the syndromes of clinical schizophrenia, prominent among whose symptoms Gabel sees morbid rationalism, understood as a weak hold on reality: "In the light of recent work, schizophrenia appears as a loss of the sense of personal history, and psychotherapy therefore consists of a reconstruction of the totality of the person with a reintegration into history. From the viewpoint of the investigator the schizophrenic loss of the historico-dialectical perception of reality can be seen in the form of a preponderance of the spatial factor or as a loss of experienced time: as over-spatialization or as sub-temporalization." (Gabel 116) Gabel's work here dovetails with that of Frank, who points to Bush 43's notorious refusal to discuss the details of his youthful debauchery before the age of about 40. It is as if these episodes were repressed and no longer accessible to memory -- at least, in Bush's own propaganda patter. Frank is certainly on firm ground when he points to the fundamentalist belief structure of Bush and of so much of his base as representing a rejection of human history, personal history, and of natural history as well: "Just as fundamentalist creationist teachings deny history, the fundamentalist notion of conversion or rebirth encourages the believer to see himself as disconnected from history. George W. Bush's evasive, self-serving defense of his life before he was born again displays just this tendency. To the believer, the power of spiritual absolution not only erases the sins of the past, but divorces the current self from the historical sinner." (Frank 59- 60)

WUE: CATASTROPHE FROM OUTSIDE A PERFECT SYSTEM

A vital part of the WUE brought about inside the perfect system by evil forces is that these evil forces are axiomatically seen as coming from outside of that perfect system. Evil is always external, never home grown, as it was for the racist southern sheriff who thought that all racial tensions were the work of outside agitators. "The result is that when the evidence of the historicity of existence forces itself on the misoneism [hatred of change] of reified consciousness, it appears as an unexpected catastrophe, inexplicable and often attributed therefore to external action .... For sociocentrism, the privileged system being perfect, any change (particularly any unfavorable change) is the work of external maleficent powers." (Gabel 288 and note) Gerhard Wisnewski has related this idea most directly to 9/11. As Wisnewski points out, "from outside" is the central slogan of the official version of 9/11. "The impression is produced that the perpetrators came 'from outside': from outside of the building, from outside of America, even from outside civilization. The official version of these events screams 'outside, outside, outside.'" (Wisnewski 143)

In a world axiomatically defined by terrorism, the Manichean outlook seems destined always to win out. Sanguinetti saw something similar in Italy at the beginning of the strategy of tension: "In view of terrorism presented as absolute evil, evil in itself and for itself: all the other evils fade in to the background and are even forgotten; since the fight against terrorism coincides with the common interest, it already is the general good, and the State, which magnanimously conducts it, is good in itself and for itself. Without the wickedness of the devil, God's infinite bounty could not appear and be appreciated as is fitting." (Sanguinetti 3)

Gabel insists again and again on the key role played by the loss of the historical dimension, and it is clear that this problem was shared by twentieth-century America with Nazi Germany and with Soviet Russia. Anglo-American propaganda exhibits an overwhelming tendency to demonize enemy leaders: Noriega, Milosevic, Bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein are notable examples, but the tendency goes back to Kaiser Wilhelm at the very least. Today the explicit speech of propaganda is conducted on the overtly infantile plane: we hear of good guys and bad guys, of bad actors, and most of all of terrorists. Gabel writes: "For Gabel, this is another symptom of reification (hypostatization): "As a prisoner of a universe where space takes the place of duration, man in the reified world cannot understand history as the expression of creativity and spontaneity. Consequently the undeniable fact of change forces itself on this 'consciousness of immediacy' as a catastrophe, as a sudden change coming from the outside that excludes mediation. ...Seen in this perspective, history appears as a function of demiurgic action. An external force (God, the hero, a party) transcends the efficiency of its autonomous dialectic. Reified consciousness is essentially ahistorical: mens momentanea seu carens recordatione,' [a mind in the moment, or lacking memory] said Leibniz on this subject." (Gabel 151) Here is history reduced to a fairy tale, with the cocaine-abusing, alcoholic, mentally-impaired Bush as the hero of the good, and the rich, misfit, raving ideologue Bin Laden as the champion of evil. How can hundreds of millions of people believe in such a product?

Gabel discusses the stress on biological heredity and race as one of the leading anti-historical features of the Nazi outlook, and there is evidence that Hitler was also well aware of this. Gabel points out that Nazi ideology, with its glorification of race and biology, was marked by "morbid rationalism in its worst form." Gabel argues that "any unfavorable event for this racial pseudo-value is itself extra-historicized and 'understood' in terms of treason or conspiracy: the ideology of national socialism is logically inseparable from the theory of the 'stab in the back."' (Gabel 117) If fascism comes to the United States, it is now certain that its ideology will prominently feature the 9/11 events as a stab in the back to a benefactor by an ungrateful and treacherous outside world; fascist neocons are already spouting this point of view. Ironically, the German request for an armistice in 1918, which Hitler later condemned as a stab in the back by Social Democratic politicians, was actually the work of Field Marshal Ludendorff and other future backers of Hitler. As for 9/11, which Bush blames on the Arab and Moslem world, it too had some of its main backers inside the US military and intelligence services.

SCHIZOPHRENIA: REJECTION OF HISTORY AND REALITY

Frank sees Bush's paranoid schizophrenic hostility to real historical processes reflected in some well-known aspects of his bureaucratic methods. One is his insistence on absolute, unquestioning loyalty on the part of his underlings: "Like the alcoholic father who is threatened by the independence of his family members, Bush demands absolute loyalty and conformity, trying to freeze his national family in time. ..." (Frank 46) For Frank, Bush has no use for history in any form; he remarks, "with a president who refuses to view history as anything but an enemy he cannot afford to acknowledge or engage, it's impossible not to wonder what painful lessons of history we may be doomed to repeat." (Frank 161)

One way of denying historical reality is to wipe out the past; another is to insist that the leading delusion of one's own time is destined to last forever. The Nazis did this in one way, Bush in another: "the historical time of national socialism was dominated ... by the chimerical hope of an empty eternity" -- there was the promise of a thousand year Reich, sometimes escalated to 20,000 years of Nazi world domination. (Gabel 134) For Bush and the neocons, this has become the nightmare vision of a war against terrorism which is literally endless.

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. Gabel sees racism as another denial of reality and history: "The racist perception of human reality is schizophrenic in several ways," he observes. Gabel also detects a depersonalization of members of the targeted group, "which is reflected particularly in caricature, the strongest weapon of ethnocentrism." (Gabel 123)

In Bush's fear-mongering oratory, the denial of reality is so great that it often approaches the qualities of hallucination, and sometimes enters into that domain. "It will be admitted that there exists a certain analogy between hallucinatory consciousness which, in its demand for homogeneity, is forced to alienate in a hallucinatory form the tendencies that it no longer manages to organize in a concrete totality, and, on the other hand, reified political consciousness which, in its postulate of political homogeneity -- a postulate which the totalitarian state tries to put into practice -- attributes to the foreigner (in the widest sense of the term, implying also political heterodoxy) facts for which a simple dialectical consideration of reality would permit a rational explanation to be given." (Gabel 279-280) Frank connects this to the hatred of the lawful character of reality, which we see manifested in Bush -- who loves to live outside the law as an individual, from his drunk driving arrests through his National Guard shenanigans to his illegal election -- and in the neocons -- who hate the very concept of international law: "Wilfred R. Bion points out that the part of the personality that hates internal law -- the laws of reality, of time, of responsibility, of loss -- hates external reality as well. It attacks links made in the mind, undermining the capacity to think and organize that comes from facing reality and its limitations. Living outside the law of mature responsibility becomes both the midwife of omnipotent fantasy and the mortician of the capacity to think." (Frank 89)

Bush boasts about his own penchant for seeing the world in black and white, as a single Manichean opposition of good and evil, with no nuances or gray areas. As Frank notes, "there are no shades of gray in this fight for civilization .... Either you're with the United States of America, or you're against the United States of America." (Frank 13) Gabel saw the same phenomenon in the Nazis: "By virtue of the implicit Manichean postulate of ideological thought, the enemies of enemies so often enjoy an undeserved favorable prejudice; for the political Manichean one is either "with us or against us," as Bush constantly repeats. (Gabel 97 note)

INFANTILE EGOCENTRISM AND ETHNOCENTRISM

Many have noted the primitive and childish quality of the Bush/neocon analysis, with its mindless parroting about good guys and bad guys. Bush's oratory also shares another key feature of the infantile mind -- egocentrism, or the tendency to see large and distant events as having been caused by ones own petty actions. This is exemplified by the suburbanite who thinks that getting the car washed will make the rain come down. After 9/11, Bush notoriously divided the world into terrorist bad guys and pro-American good guys. He insisted, in other words, that the world should be forever organized around this single event. Gabel shows that adult egocentrism and schizophrenia go together: "A zoologist who, having been successively bitten by a dog and a cat, used as a scientific concept 'the animal species which bites zoologists' would be guilty of false egocentric identification ... False identification is an important aspect of the anti-dialectical structure of ideologies and, at the same time, a valued technique of economy of effort for propaganda." (Gabel 92) What egocentrism represents in the stunted individual, ethnocentrism accomplishes for the sick society. Think of Bush's Post-9/11 axis of evil, composed of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Yet, there had been no rogue states' summit to sign a treaty of alliance among these three. Iraq and Iran had been enemies, and North Korea, a true hermit kingdom, lived in its own isolation. Yet, Bush insisted like a small child in defining the three exclusively in relation to himself -- within, it should go without saying, a universe of discourse already defined by the 9/11 myth. Once again, Gabel described something similar under the Nazis. Under the Nazi regime, "the non-German world seems to a large extent to have been interpreted in terms of the postulate that the enemy world was homogeneous. This was less because of a working hypothesis about propaganda than ideological convictions of a delirious nature." (Gabel 120) The Nazis portrayed a world of capitalists, Bolsheviks, and Jews who were all mythically united in their hatred for Germany.

Although often couched in religious terms, the neocon ideology is close not only to that of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, but also to that of the Nazi sociologist Gumplowitz, whose major work was devoted to the conflict of the races. This is also not far from Huntington's clash of civilizations. In each of these cases, history is dominated by mythical entities. We think of the Cambone-Boykin-Geoffrey Miller axis in the Pentagon and US Army; Boykin was responsible for a raving declaration that his Christian God is stronger than the God of Islam, and that Islam is satanic. In reality, Boykin knows nothing of universal Christianity, and the god he worships is between totem and Mammon. Schizophrenic personalities like Boykin and Miller (a member of the sinister religious sect called The Fellowship) were observed to have been over-represented among the personnel of the Nazi concentration camps. The same would appear to be the case among the Bush administration; Cambone, Boykin, and Miller have become the architects of the gulag that stretches from Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib to the system of illegal CIA secret dungeons and illegal ghost prisoners reported to be operating in numerous countries. Frank notes that "the eminent psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan has written that we need an enemy to rally the community around a 'chosen trauma.' Almost immediately after 9/11, Bush began speaking of the war, in grandiose terms, as a kind of epic and eternal struggle .... Making the war against terrorism perennial keeps him in power, by keeping the terror externalized." (Frank 98) Although Frank hesitates to say so, 9/11 is obviously the chosen trauma.

BUSH'S DIVINE MISSION AS SCHIZOPHRENIC SYMPTOM

Bush has spoken of his own role in regard to 9/11 and Iraq as a divine mission assigned to him by God; especially chilling was his remark that he did not consult his own father before the aggression against Iraq, but did consult his "higher father." Here we have the image of the hero who goes forth on a divine quest to hold back the forces of chaos and the WUE. As Frank reminds us, "Bush has always been surprisingly explicit in declaring that he sees himself on a mission from God, and it is his belief in that divine assignment in which we see the most potent combination of politics, psychology, and faith at work." (Frank 71) For Gabel, this notion of a divine mission is an integral part of the schizophrenic misperception of historical change in the real world. Gabel links "the syndrome of external action and the deranged experience of the end of the world.... Consequently, when the event forces itself into reified consciousness, the latter makes this evident through a double technique of partial obscuration: from the point of view of causal explanation it interprets it as the act of an external power; on the level of lived experience it experiences it either as a catastrophe or, on the contrary, as a sudden significant (and always heteronomic) irruption into the axiological void [vacuum of values] of the world itself: a divine mission. In short, like a manic crisis, the WUE is an axiological crisis, a sort of storm of values on the boundaries of two atmospheres of different axiological-dialectical density .... Thus a connection is created between morbid rationalism and the phenomenon of the end of the world experience. It is as one aspect of the anti-dialectical mode of being-in-the-world that one can place the WUE in the same ambit as deranged perceptions, hallucinations, and other elements of sub-realist experience." (Gabel 292- 93) Heteronomy is the opposite of autonomy; it is the unfree state of being controlled by outside forces, such as manipulation of the traumas of one's own past.

In a striking insight, Gabel shows that the road to a thoroughly schizophrenic foreign policy is paved with ultimata. The Bushes have been prodigal with ultimata: there was one to Saddam Hussein in 1991, one to the Taliban regime in 2001, and another to Saddam in 2003. For Gabel, these come straight from the schizophrenic tool kit of projection; he says that "behavior does exist on a societal level that is phenomenologically close to the psychiatrists' 'mirror symptom' -- This is when a State -- usually totalitarian -- chooses a fictitious interlocutor in order to have an act of violence or a territorial conquest ratified in the form of a supposed negotiation. This is -- just like the clinical phenomenon in question -- an illusion of encounter with an artificial interlocutor; a behavior of schizophrenic structure." (Gabel 259)

Reagan hailed the "magic of the marketplace," obviously a very white magic. In the grim times of 9/11, Bush 43 has had to deal mostly with black magic, but there have been exceptions. One was in the dreamtime that lasted a week or two for some observers after the fall of Baghdad to the Anglo-American aggressors. Frank is right to comment that "there's no clearer example of magical thinking than the 'Mission Accomplished' banner that served as a backdrop to Bush's flight-suit photo op on the Abraham Lincoln." (Frank 86) The essence of magic is action at a distance, which Sir Isaac Newton unfortunately made presentable in the Anglo-American world. The official story of 9/11, with everything directed in the last analysis by Bin Laden using his laptop in the distant cave of Afghanistan, represents a thinly veiled version of magical action at a distance. Gabel pointed out more than a quarter of a century earlier that racism too is based on a magical and irrational world outlook which "also admits fairly often the existence of action at a distance of an undeniably magico-schizophrenic nature ... this is the very definition of paranoid deranged thought ...." (Gabel 123-4)

RESULT: THE 9/11 MYTH AS PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

Because of the capitulation of the Democratic party and of the liberal intellectual establishment associated with it, Bush and the neocons have enjoyed success as mythographers beyond their wildest dreams. The tenant of the White House may have discovered in the powers of myth a stimulant more potent than his beloved Jack Daniels; at one point, according to a reporter, Bush appeared "bedazzled by his administration's own mythmaking." (New York Times, July 31, 2003) Out of the preceding considerations, we can gradually come to understand the 9/11 myth in its actual status as a kind of Ersatz (substitute) religion, or more precisely as an hysterical Ersatz civic religion designed to promote social cohesiveness when all other ideologies have failed. What Franks says in his summary of Bush and Iraq applies even better to the American public and the 9/11 myth: "The individual who clings tenaciously to unverified beliefs confuses his beliefs with fact, and often inflicts this confusion on others in his struggle to resolve it in his favor. When many people are persuaded to subscribe to the same pretense, of course, it can gain the aura of objectivity; as British psychoanalyst Ron Britton has observed, 'we can substitute concurrence for reality testing, and so shared phantasy can gain the same or even greater status than knowledge.' The belief doesn't become a fact, but the fact of shared belief lends it the valuable appearance of credibility. The belief is codified, takes hold, and rises above the level where it might be questioned. Shared beliefs can come to define a community; religion is, after all, a communal structure, uniting groups in shared beliefs. In societies where religion is especially powerful, such shared beliefs can actually become law, imposed on others, often restricting their behavior." (Franks 62)

THE 9/11 MYTH AND THE EPIDEMIC OF AUTISM IN THE US

There remains the question of to what degree the social and intellectual hegemony of the 9/11 myth, especially as purveyed by its mentally impaired poster boy, is generating avoidable schizophrenic disorders in the US population and abroad. One form that such an epidemic might take would be an upsurge of autism among the most vulnerable members of society -- among children, who are amazingly adept at absorbing the fears, anxieties, and distortions of the adult world around them. Evidence of just such a phenomenon is not hard to find. About two years after September 11, Newsweek devoted an important cover story to "Girls, Boys, and Autism." According to the article, there are now more than a million Americans suffering from this disorder, 80% of them males. The article gives no figures for the growth in the number of cases, but the publication of this article and the attention it received suggests that the number of cases is rising, especially among the most vulnerable -- children, but not among them alone. (Newsweek, September 8, 2003) In 2002 the New York Times reported that "a shocking report from California last week suggested that a large increase in childhood autism in that state over the last 15 years is a true epidemic, not a statistical mirage inflated by artificial factors." (New York Times, October 23, 2002) Research by qualified experts will be necessary to determine whether there is in fact a causal link between the 9/11 myth and these disturbing reports.

According to some, the autism epidemic is genetically determined. According to others, it is a by-product of certain ill-advised vaccinations. But there is no reason why it could not be socially, culturally, and politically determined. This is exactly what one would expect in a traumatized country dominated by a compulsory schizophrenic belief system, whose apparent leadership figure demonstrates a whole range of megalomaniac schizophrenic symptoms. One means of fighting the growth of culturally and socially induced autism would surely be to junk the schizophrenic myth of 9/11, and replace it with a true and reasoned account of what took place in the real world.

PART 1 OF 2

CHAPTER XIV: NETWORKS OF INTEREST

... no one can be called a good man who, in order to support himself, takes up a profession that obliges him at all times to be rapacious, fraudulent, and cruel, as of course must be all of those -- no matter what their rank -- who make a trade of war.
--Niccolo Machiavelli, The Art of war.

The neocons are an intensely ideological faction, and we are therefore on firm ground if we examine their ideology as a guide to their conduct. We must only remember that the neocons make a rigid separation between the elite truths that they tell each other -- their esoteric doctrine -- and the belief structure they offer for the edification of the masses -- the exoteric doctrine. The esoteric doctrine is often transmitted verbally, rather than by published writings. Still, the published writings allow us to see the basic neocon outlook clearly enough. What we find is an embrace of war, violence, hatred, coups, martial law, and, most important for our present purposes, terrorism.

The supreme neocon guru is Leo Strauss (1899-1973), who taught politics for many years at the University of Chicago, and later at St. John's of Annapolis. Strauss was a Marburg Kantian of the Herman Cohen school who did his doctorate with the irrationalist Ernst Cassirer. Strauss studied for two years with grants of the Rockefeller Foundation, which he procured with the help of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Among Strauss's students were Alan Bloom, the author of the Closing of the American Mind, and Harvey Mansfield of Harvard. The Straussian-neocon network is now extensive, and stretches over three generations. Neocons are famous for helping one another up the career ladder, and for teaching courses based only on neocon texts. They are narrow-minded, sectarian, and essentially ignorant of philosophy and history. They are an ideological faction, often a fanatical faction. We are talking about Wolfowitz, Feith, Bolton, Luti, Schulsky, Scooter Libby, Cambone, Hadley and others who run the Bush administration. Neocons outside of government include Perle, Woolsey, Irving and William Kristol, Norman and John Podhoretz, Saul and Adam Bellow, and so forth. The older generation of neocons were often Trotskyist communists; they have retained Trotskyite theories like the notion of competing elites; the neocons see a battle between the liberal elite and themselves as central to the political process.

LEO STRAUSS'S NIHILIST REVOLUTION: AN APOLOGY FOR TERROR

At the heart of Leo Strauss's political thought is an open apology for terrorism. This idea is illuminated in Strauss's exchange of comments with Alexandre Kojeve, a neo-Hegelian official of the French finance ministry, in the 1950s. At the heart of this debate is the question of the universal and homogenous state, and how philosophers should react to its existence. The universal homogenous state means something like a world where war and underdevelopment have been eliminated, and in which leisure time and well-being are rising. For most people, the universal homogenous state would look like a world of peace, progress, and prosperity.

But for Strauss and Kojeve, peace, progress, and prosperity mean the end of history because they wipe out the higher human values, which depend upon politics, and thus upon war. (Implicit also is the idea that peace, progress, and prosperity are bad for oligarchical domination, a cause dear to Strauss and Kojeve.) Strauss sums it up thus: "This end of History would be most exhilarating, but for the fact that, according to Kojeve, it is the participation in bloody political struggles as well as in real work or, generally expressed, the negating action, which raises man above the brutes." (Strauss 208)

For Strauss and Kojeve, "unlimited technological progress and its accompaniment, which are indispensable conditions of the universal and homogeneous state, are destructive of humanity. It is perhaps possible to say that the universal and homogeneous state is fated to come. But it is certainly impossible to say that man can reasonably be satisfied with it." (Strauss 208) This view of technology is that of the Greek historian called the Old Oligarch (who did not like the long walls and the Athenian navy), and is certainly not that of Plato. For Strauss, Greek philosophy is a screen upon which he projects his own ignorant opinions.

Not caring about what Plato really thought, Strauss advances towards his terrible conclusion: "If the universal and homogeneous state is the goal of History, History is absolutely 'tragic. ' Its completion will reveal that the human problem, and hence in particular the problem of the relation of philosophy and politics, is insoluble." (Strauss 208)

In Strauss's view, the imminent coming of the universal homogeneous state means that all progress accomplished by mankind to date has been worthless: "For centuries and centuries men have unconsciously done nothing but work their way through infinite labors and struggles and agonies, yet ever again catching hope, toward the universal and homogeneous state, and as soon as they have arrived at the end of their journey, they realize that through arriving at it they have destroyed their humanity, and thus returned, as in a cycle, to the prehuman beginnings of History." (Strauss 209)

This raises the question of the violent revolt against the universal homogeneous state, which is what Strauss regards as inevitable and desirable: "Yet there is no reason for despair as long as human nature has not been conquered completely, i.e., as long as sun and man still generate man. There will always be men (andres) who will revolt against a state which is destructive of humanity or in which there is no longer a possibility of noble action or of great deeds." (Strauss 209)

The Universal & Homogenous State, by Tara Carreon

When the real men revolt against too much peace, progress, and prosperity, what will be their program? Strauss: "They may be forced into a mere negation of the universal and homogeneous state, into a negation not enlightened by any positive goal, into a nihilistic negation. While perhaps doomed to failure, that nihilist revolution may be the only great and noble deed that is possible once the universal and homogeneous state has become inevitable. But no one can know whether it will fail or succeed. (Strauss 209, emphasis added)

What can be understood by nihilistic negation and nihilist revolution? In the nineteenth century, nihilism was an ideology of terrorism; the crazed bomb-throwers who assassinated statesmen and rulers across Europe and America (including President McKinley) were atheists, anarchists and nihilists. In the twentieth century, the nihilist revolution was synonymous with some of the most extreme factions of fascism and Nazis. "Long live death!" was a slogan of some of them. With these lines, Strauss has opened the door to fascism, murder, mayhem, war, genocide, and most emphatically to terrorism. And he is not shy about spelling this out.

LEO STRAUSS: BACK TO THE STONE AGE

What will the nihilist revolution look like? Strauss writes: "Someone may object that the successful revolt against the universal and homogeneous state could have no other effect than that the identical historical process which led from the primitive horde to the final state will be repeated." (Strauss 209, emphasis added) The primitive horde or primal horde refers to the human communities of the Paleolithic hunting and gathering societies, to the foragers and cave people of the Old Stone Age. Strauss is endorsing a nihilistic revolt that will have the effect of destroying as much as 10,000 years of progress in civilization, and in hurling humanity back to its wretched predicament in the Paleolithic. Here Strauss finds a momentary common ground with Rousseau, who also had a liking for the Paleolithic; here we are close to the ideas which animated the reign of terror in the French Revolution.

Strauss comes as a Job's comforter to those who have been thrown back into the Old Stone Age: "But would such a repetition of the process -- a new lease on life for man and humanity -- not be preferable to the indefinite continuation of the inhuman end? Do we not enjoy every spring although we know the cycle of the seasons, although we know that winter will come again?" (Strauss 209) Springtime for Leo Strauss has thus acquired the idiosyncratic meaning of a return to the horrors of the Old Stone Age.

Blood shone at me from the red light of the crystal, and when I picked it up to discover its mystery, there lay the horror uncovered before me: in the depths of what is to come lay murder. The blond hero lay slain. The black beetle is the death that is necessary for renewal; and so thereafter, a new sun glowed, the sun of the depths, full of riddles, a sun of the night. And as the rising sun of spring quickens the dead earth, so the sun of the depths quickened the dead, and thus began the terrible struggle between light and darkness. Out of that burst the powerful and ever unvanquished source of blood. This was what was to come, which you now experience in your life, and it is even more than that. (I had this vision on the night of 12 December 1913.)

-- The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

Short of turning back the clock to the Paleolithic, Strauss sees one promising possibility latent in Kojeve's universal homogeneous state. This concerns the opportunity for political violence, yet another form of terrorism: "Kojeve does seem to leave an outlet for action in the universal and homogeneous state. In that state the risk of violent death is still involved in the struggle for political leadership .... But the opportunity for action can exist only for a tiny minority. And besides, is this not a hideous prospect: a state in which the last refuge of man's humanity is political assassination in the particularly sordid form of the palace revolution?" (Strauss 209) Such sporadic and limited violence is not enough for Strauss.

Marx and Engels had written about the realm of freedom which would result from higher stages of economic development in the form of a communist utopia. Strauss transforms their communist slogan into an invective against middle class progress and middle class values in general when he concludes this passage with the call: "Warriors and workers of all countries, unite, while there is still time, to prevent the coming of the 'realm of freedom.' Defend with might and main, if it needs to be defended, the 'realm of necessity."' (Strauss 209) Putting aside the superficial polemic against communist utopia, Strauss's goal here is to argue that peace, progress, and prosperity are destructive to oligarchy, and anything must be preferred to such an outcome.

Being An Answer To Mr. Burke's Attack On The French Revolution

Among the incivilities by which nations or individuals provoke and irritate each other, Mr. Burke's pamphlet on the French Revolution is an extraordinary instance. Neither the People of France, nor the National Assembly, were troubling themselves about the affairs of England, or the English Parliament; and that Mr. Burke should commence an unprovoked attack upon them, both in Parliament and in public, is a conduct that cannot be pardoned on the score of manners, nor justified on that of policy.

There is scarcely an epithet of abuse to be found in the English language, with which Mr. Burke has not loaded the French Nation and the National Assembly. Everything which rancour, prejudice, ignorance or knowledge could suggest, is poured forth in the copious fury of near four hundred pages. In the strain and on the plan Mr. Burke was writing, he might have written on to as many thousands. When the tongue or the pen is let loose in a frenzy of passion, it is the man, and not the subject, that becomes exhausted.

Hitherto Mr. Burke has been mistaken and disappointed in the opinions he had formed of the affairs of France; but such is the ingenuity of his hope, or the malignancy of his despair, that it furnishes him with new pretences to go on. There was a time when it was impossible to make Mr. Burke believe there would be any Revolution in France. His opinion then was, that the French had neither spirit to undertake it nor fortitude to support it; and now that there is one, he seeks an escape by condemning it.

Not sufficiently content with abusing the National Assembly, a great part of his work is taken up with abusing Dr. Price (one of the best-hearted men that lives) and the two societies in England known by the name of the Revolution Society and the Society for Constitutional Information.

Dr. Price had preached a sermon on the 4th of November, 1789, being the anniversary of what is called in England the Revolution, which took place 1688. Mr. Burke, speaking of this sermon, says: "The political Divine proceeds dogmatically to assert, that by the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights:

1. To choose our own governors.
2. To cashier them for misconduct.
3. To frame a government for ourselves."

Dr. Price does not say that the right to do these things exists in this or in that person, or in this or in that description of persons, but that it exists in the whole; that it is a right resident in the nation. Mr. Burke, on the contrary, denies that such a right exists in the nation, either in whole or in part, or that it exists anywhere; and, what is still more strange and marvellous, he says: "that the people of England utterly disclaim such a right, and that they will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes." That men should take up arms and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke.

-- Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine

Here we have a blanket endorsement of forms of violence and mayhem, including terrorism and war, in doses large enough to send world civilization back to the Stone Age. This implies genocide on a scale far beyond Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Today's world population is about 6.25 billion, and barely subsists on the basis of realized technological and industrial progress. But under hunting and gathering conditions, the demographic carrying capacity of the earth would be reduced to 25-50 million. If implemented today, Strauss's program for dismantling the universal homogeneous state would mean a genocide of something approaching 6 billion victims, two whole orders of magnitude beyond Hitler.

And even this must be put into perspective. Strauss notoriously feared to write what he really believed; the public could never face the full truth of his doctrines. Therefore, what we find written in On Tyranny is very likely a somewhat diluted view of his real views. So if Strauss lite, the exoteric version that he felt comfortable publishing at the height of his career, spells up to 6 billion victims, God save us from the full fury of Strauss's esoteric version as it may be transmitted among the neocons infesting and controlling the United States government under the Bush regime.

The most urgent anti-terrorist measure of them all would thus appear to be a purge of neocons from all branches of government (including the Carl Schmitt disciples Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas on the Supreme Court), and a general quarantine of neocons as what they really are, neo-fascists and neo-Nazis.

NEOCONS PREFER WAR TO PEACE

When Strauss talks about the universal and homogenous state, as we have seen, he is referring to something which the ordinary person might identify as peace, progress, and prosperity, with a good measure of equality and of international pacification. For most people, such a situation might seem to be almost ideal, but for the self-styled neocon intellectual, it represents the abolition of all human values and of everything that makes life worth living. The US Constitution mandates that the government pursue the General Welfare, but for the neocons this is anathema, since among other things it threatens their most cherished principle -- oligarchy. In particular, the neocons were not happy with the subsiding of the Cold War, and viewed the 1993 Oslo peace accords between the Israelis and the Palestinians, as well as the Good Friday agreement regarding Northern Ireland in 1998 -- which the world warmly welcomed -- with great consternation. These aspects of neocon thought are derived most prominently from the proto-fascist Nietzsche, but also from the card-carrying Nazis Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, and of course from their chief guru, the neo-fascist professor Leo Strauss. Since the neocon rejection of some of the greatest goods of civilization is likely to be incomprehensible to many readers, we need to pause to illustrate it.

In May 2004 the Washington Post carried an article by Corey Robin, assistant professor of political science at Brooklyn College in the City University of New York. Robin had carried out interviews with some well-known neocons and fellow travelers in the late summer of 2001, just before synthetic terrorism transformed the scene. Here we can sample the deep discontent and restless desire for conflict which prevailed among these circles at that time.

Robin heard from Irving Kristol, the father of William Kristol, the central figure of the warmongering Project for a New American Century, whose web site was vainly calling for full-scale war with Iraq during Clinton's second term. Kristol lamented that the US was too focused on economic prosperity, and was not sufficiently aggressive in the defense of its global hegemony. "It's too bad," complained Kristol. "I think it would be natural for the United States ... to play a far more dominant role in world affairs ... to command and give orders as to what is to be done. People need that. There are many parts of the world where an authority willing to use troops can make ... a healthy difference." Kristol reserved particular scorn for any concern about the health or well-being of the population in general, which he scorned as a matter for accountants. "I think it's disgusting that ... presidential politics of the most important country in the world should revolve around prescriptions for elderly people."

Robin found that the neocons prized "mystery and vitality over calculation and technology," and even over money and markets. Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby, one of the schemers who brought us the Iraq war, commented that "the cult of peace and prosperity found expression in President Clinton's weak and distracted foreign policy," which had made it easier for Bin Laden to run wild. Robin commented further: "Though conservatives reputedly favor wealth and prosperity, law and order, stability and routine, they disdained Clinton for his very pursuit of these virtues. His quest for affluence, they argued, produced a society that lost its depth and political meaning." And again: "Clinton's vision of a benign international order, conservatives argued, betrayed an unwillingness to take on a world of power and violence, of mysterious evil and unfathomable hatred. Coping with such a world requires pagan courage and barbaric virtue, qualities many conservatives embrace over the more prosaic goods of peace and prosperity."

The neocons, according to Robin, see 9/11 as an opportunity to exalt their "political virtues such as heroism and struggle" over "the numbing politics of affluence" because of their new-found ability to go to the public with "calls for sacrifice and destiny." The neocons were afflicted by a self-righteous and hypocritical megalomania: they fervently believed that the United States, with its $500 billion yearly trade deficit and its hollow army of ten divisions could "govern events -- and determine the outcome of history." Based on this evidence, it is fair to say that at the turn of the millennium, the neocon faction was searching for new opportunities for conflict and violence. When those opportunities arrived, the neocons rejoiced and rushed into their favorite enterprise of sending other people's children into useless wars. (Washington Post, May 2, 2004)

NEOCONS: CUCKOLDS OF MARS

Catholic traditionalist Patrick Buchanan showed some awareness of this same restlessness and desire for new conflicts among the neocons during the 1999-2000 presidential campaign, when he commented that he was alarmed by the clique around candidate G. W. Bush -- a reference to the neocon group that pretentiously and ignorantly called itself the "Vulcans." In a speech about foreign policy, Buchanan noted that he had worked with some of these neocons in previous administrations, and that he now found them consumed by nostalgia for the Cold War, and therefore very likely to pursue "conflict," "intervention," "confrontation," and "bullying." Buchanan ridiculed the "little magazines" of the neocon cabal, where they had been developing their concept of the US as a "benevolent global hegemon" -- a role which many other states could be counted upon to reject. Buchanan added that, while the Clinton crowd had at least been canny enough to pick fights with smaller powers like Serbia, the Bush clique was determined to promote confrontation with larger powers who had the capability of inflicting great harm on the United States. The great exemplar of all these trends, said Buchanan, was Wolfowitz, who at that time thought he was on the way to being secretary of state.

Vulcan, or Hephaestos, was of course the Graeco-Roman god of volcanoes, fire, and the smithy. He was married to Venus, but she betrayed him in favor of Mars, the god of war. So Vulcan was a cuckold of Mars, as our ignorant and pretentious Vulcans seem to have forgotten. But Mars has come back to make them cuckolds too, in Iraq and shortly in Afghanistan as well.

David Brooks had written in Newsweek that, during the 1990s, Americans had "renovated our kitchens, refurbished our home entertainment systems, invested in patio furniture, jacuzzis, and gas grills." Leaving aside the arid banality of Brooks' class-distorted view of the world, we must recall that for most Americans there was no peace dividend worth mentioning at the end of the Cold War. (Washington Post, May 2, 2004) And the pre-9/11 world was in reality no idyll, but rather a world of growing financial breakdown and military tension, as we have shown elsewhere in this book.

The passing of Marxism-Leninism first from China and then from the Soviet Union will mean its death as a living ideology of world historical significance. For a while there may be some isolated true believers left in places like Managua, Pyongyang, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, but the fact that there is not a single large state in which it is a going concern undermines completely its pretensions to being in the vanguard of human history. And the death of this ideology means the growing "Common Marketization" of international relations, and the diminution of the likelihood of large-scale conflict between states.

This does not by any means imply the end of international conflict per se. For the world at that point would be divided between a part that was historical and a part that was post historical. Conflict between states still in history, and between those states and those at the end of history, would still be possible. There would still be a high and perhaps rising level of ethnic and nationalist violence, since those are impulses incompletely played out, even in parts of the post historical world. Palestinians and Kurds, Sikhs and Tamils, Irish Catholics and Walloons, Armenians and Azeris, will continue to have their unresolved grievances. This implies that terrorism and wars of national liberation will continue to be an important item on the international agenda. But large-scale conflict must involve large states still caught in the grip of history, and they are what appear to be passing from the scene.

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.

-- The End of History?, by Francis Fukuyama

CARL SCHMITT: POISON GAS ON GERMAN CITIES

Leo Strauss was the product of three main intellectual and political influences. First among these was the proto-Nazi Friedrich Nietzsche, who was designated by Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg as one of the four precursors of Hitlerism (the others were the operatic composer Richard Wagner, the anti-Semitic LaGarde, and the racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain). A second was the card-carrying Nazi Martin Heidegger, who praised Hitler in his inaugural speech as rector of the University of Freiburg. Finally, there is the card-carrying Nazi Cart Schmitt, the main legal theorist of the Third Reich.

Schmitt's ideas have directly contributed to the shattering of the US political consensus under the Bush regime. For Schmitt, politics comes down to the distinction between friend and foe. Starting from this extremely meager reduction of human motivation, he goes on to equate politics with warfare: if there is no warfare or conflict, then politics is dead, and life is no longer worth living. Schmitt therefore wants politics to be the monopoly of a strong state, and he does not like the idea that the state or the government could be influenced by the citizens. Schmitt's thought is thus revealed as authoritarian, dictatorial, fascistic. It is from Schmitt that Samuel Huntington got his idea that an enemy image is absolutely necessary for the cohesion of any society. In reality, however, it is primarily an oligarchical society which requires an enemy image, because that society is based on an irrational principle of domination which cannot stand the kind of scrutiny it would receive in peacetime.George Orwell understood this aspect well when he suggested in 1984 that the endless war among Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia was really a war waged by each of these states against its own population, for the purpose of perpetuating a hierarchical society.

The card-carrying Nazi Schmitt was also a bitter opponent, not just of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, but of international law and international treaties in general. Like his neocon descendants of today, he was an ardent unilateralist. Here are some of Schmitt's typical comments about international law: "We are talking again about basic rights, about the basic rights of peoples and of states, and especially about the basic rights of those states who have, mindful of their own race, gotten themselves into the proper domestic order. Such a state is the national socialist state, which has led the German people back to an awareness of itself and its race. We proceed from the most self-evident of all basic rights, the right to one's own existence. This is an inalienable, eternal basic right, in which the right to self-determination, self-defense, and to the means of self-defense is included ... From our solid standpoint we can see through that world of legalistic argumentation and that huge apparatus of treaties and pacts, and assign this tower of Babel to its rightful place in the history of international law."

Schmitt was the author of Article 48 of the 1919 Constitution of the Weimar Republic, which was the clause that allowed the Reich President to declare an emergency or state of siege and thereafter rule by decree. Schmitt's activity during the 1920s was largely devoted to agitating in favor of the dissolution or marginalization of the Reichstag (parliament) and the institution of a dictatorship of the President of the Reich. One of Schmitt's favorite sayings was that sovereignty meant the ability to declare a state of emergency. If you can find what organ of government has the ability to call out the state of siege, suspend the legislature, and impose martial law, Schmitt reasoned, you have found the place where sovereignty is actually located.

For Schmitt, the concept of emergency rule is a totally lawless realm; under it, the ruling authority can do literally anything it wants, without regard to law, separation of powers, constitutional freedoms, equity, or anything else. In one of his essays Schmitt approvingly quotes a speech by the Reich Justice Minister Schiffer to the Reichstag on March 3, 1920, in which Schiffer points out that under Article 48, the Reich President can attack "German cities with poison gas, if that is, in the concrete case, the necessary measure for the re-establishment of law and order." (Schmitt, Die Diktatur, 201) Schmitt was adamant that the emergency provisions of the Weimar constitution were theoretically and practically unlimited, and could be used to justify the greatest imaginable atrocities. We see here a tradition of thought, alive in the Schmittian-Straussian neocons of today, which would have no trouble in accommodating a crime on the scope of 9/11.

In July, 1932 the Nazis and their allies carried out a cold coup against the minority Social Democratic caretaker government in Prussia, the largest political subdivision of Germany. The pro-Nazi government in Prussia then became the springboard for Hitler's seizure of power via a legal coup in January 1933. Carl Schmitt was the lawyer for the coup forces in the German supreme court in Leipzig. (The parallels of this action to the Schwarzenegger/Warren Buffet oligarchical coup in California in 2003 are more than suggestive, since California is the largest US political subdivision in the same way that Prussia was in Germany.) Schmitt also provided legal services for Hitler's seizure of power in January, 1933.

Carl Schmitt wrote articles for the gutter-level anti-Semitic tabloid Der Sturmer, edited by Julius Streicher. In 1934, when Hitler massacred the brown-shirted SA leader Ernst Rohm and his faction for supporting a second revolution against the financiers, industrialists, and the army, Schmitt quickly emerged as one of Hitler's most shameless apologists. In his scurrilous pamphlet, "Der Fuhrer Schutz das Recht" ("The Fuhrer defends the law"), Schmitt endorsed the Byzantine theory according to which law is a successful act of strength by the stronger party against the weaker. Schmitt wrote that the primary task of the Fuehrer was "to distinguish friend from enemy ... The Fuhrer takes the warnings of German history seriously. That gives him the right and the power to found a new state and a new order ... The Fuhrer protects the law from the worst abuse, when he -- in the moment of danger -- through the power of his leadership as supreme judge, directly creates law. His role as supreme judge flows from his role as supreme leader. Anyone who wants to separate one of these from the other is trying to unhinge the state with the help of the justice system .... the Fuhrer himself determines the content and scope of a crime." (Schmitt 200) This opens the door to every arbitrary outrage under color of law. While these ideas, so dear to today's ruling neocons, have been applied to Abu Ghraib, it is also clear that they are equally applicable to 9/11.

STRAUSS AND NIETZSCHE

As a young man, Strauss was an enthusiastic devotee of Nietzsche. Strauss wrote: "I can only say that Nietzsche so dominated and bewitched me between my 22nd and 30th years, that I literally believed everything that I understood of him ..."(Strauss to Karl Lowith, 23 June 1935, in Strauss, Leo and Karl Lowith, "Correspondence," Independent Journal of Philosophy, vol. 516, 1988, pp. 177-192.) For the young Strauss, Nietzsche was an idol, and the main vehicle of his youthful protests: "... the young Strauss, after a day of reading at the Prussian State Library, would go to a cafe on Unter den Linden and pronounce the name 'Nietzsche' loud enough to be heard at the other tables." (See Leo Strauss, "An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John's," Interpretation, vol. 7, no. 31-2; cited by Michael Platt in Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Soffer eds., The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective [Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1987], 23.) According to Straussian scholars, "In Nietzsche, Strauss certainly discovered the immoderation of philosophy, but in Nietzsche, especially the late Nietzsche, he also met the love of his life." (Deutsch and Soffer, 23)

As the neocons never tire of reminding us, ideas have consequences. If Strauss is based to such an extraordinary degree on Nietzsche, then we may be permitted to take a minute to see which Nietzsche it was that Strauss admired so much. The guess here is that it was Nietzsche as the glorifier of hierarchy, slavery, violence, war, and terrorism. In some of the notes that Nietzsche made during the time he was writing his Genealogy of Morals, we read: "Which way? We need a new terrorism." ("Das Problem wohin? Es bedarf eines neuen Terrorismus.") (Nietzsche vol. XIV, p. 334, emphasis added.)

Or, in the section of Ecce Homo entitled "Why I am a fate," we find the following: "I know my fate. My name will be linked someday to the memory of something monstrous -- to a crisis whose like never existed on earth, to the deepest clash of conscience, to a decision conjured up against everything which had been believed, promoted, held sacred up to then. I am not a man, I am dynamite." ("Ich kenne mein Los. Es wird sich einmal an meinem Namen die Erinnerung an etwas Ungeheures AnknUpfen, -an eine Krisis, wie es keine aufErden gab, an die tiefste Gewissens- ollision, an eine Entscheidung, heraufbeschworen gegen alles, was bis dahin geglaubt, gefordert, geheiligt worden war. Ich bin kein Mensch, ich bin Dynamit.") (Nietzsche vol. VII p. 317, emphasis added.) This passage was a favorite of the German neocon Armin Mohler, the author of the Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1918-1932.

Nietzsche was full of contempt and hatred for the middle class, family life, and the quest for economic security, which he always saw in connection with the inferior "last men." Nietzsche is the great glorifier of war, conflict, violence, and cruelty, which he regards not just as unavoidable but also as positive goods: "We think that hardness, forcefulness, slavery, danger in the alley and the heart, life in hiding, stoicism, the art of experiment and deviltry of every kind, that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey and serpents, serves the enhancement of the species 'man' as much as its opposite does." (Beyond Good and Evil 54-55) It is from Nietzsche that today's neocons derive their endless fascination with warfare and bloodshed: "You should always be such men as are always looking for an enemy -- for your enemy. And with some of you there is hate at first sight. You should seek your enemy and wage your war -- a war for your opinions. ... You should love peace as a means to new wars. And the short peace more than the long. I do not exhort you to work but to battle. I do not exhort you to peace, but to victory. May your work be a battle, may your peace be a victory! ... You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every cause. War and courage have done more great things than charity .... Are you ugly? Very well, my brothers! Take the sublime about you, the mantle of the ugly." (Zarathustra 74)

Bush's supporters among the Christian fundamentalists and Christian Zionists would perhaps be surprised to know what neocons (to whom Bush has turned over the government) think about Christ and Christianity. Nietzsche referred to Christ as an "idiot," (Twilight of the Idols/The Antichrist 202). In addition to his famous proposition that God is dead, Nietzsche also proclaimed a special role for himself: "I am ... the Anti-Christ" (Ecce Homo III 2) Nietzsche, like Strauss after him, was an exponent of European atheist nihilism, and this remains the underlying -- esoteric -- outlook of the neocons who are ruling the US. At one point Nietzsche asks himself, "What does nihilism mean?" His answer "That the highest values are devalued. The goal is missing: the answer to 'why?' is missing." (Lukacs, Von Nietzsche zu Hitler [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1966], 69) If God is dead, all crimes are allowed.

Thus the neocon publicist Robert Kaplan, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Force, wrote in his recent Warrior Politics that a pagan ethos of war and cruelty is necessary to face the great crises of this age. For Kaplan, the philosophical and social content of Christianity is a great obstacle to inculcating the proper attitude in the US ruling class. Among other things, Kaplan finds that the Roman Emperor Tiberius (under whose rule the crucifixion of Christ took place) has been treated unfairly by historians, and deserves to be rehabilitated. Similarly, one of neocon Paul Wolfowitz's favorite quips is reportedly the infamous "Oderint dum metuant" -- let them hate me, as long as they fear me -- a line from the Latin writer Accius later popularized by the infamous Emperor Caligula.

Strauss is well aware that Nietzsche is a genocidalist, but this does not disturb his admiration for the sage of Turin. As Strauss wrote in What is Political Philosophy (1959): "Being certain of the tameness of modern western man, [Nietzsche] preached the sacred right of 'merciless extinction' of large masses of men. He used much of his unsurpassable and inexhaustible power of passionate and fascinating speech for making his readers loathe, not only socialism and communism, but conservatism, nationalism, and democracy as well. After having taken upon himself this great political responsibility, he could not show his readers a way to political responsibility. [I.e., he could not seize power, WGT] He left them no choice except that between irresponsible indifference to politics and irresponsible political options. He thus prepared a regime which, as long as it lasted, made discredited democracy look again like a golden age. He tried to articulate his understanding both of the modern situation and of human life as such by his doctrine of the will to power." In other words, Strauss knows very well that Nietzsche was a precursor of Hitler, but supports him anyway as a philosopher for today.

A storm cellar for neocons and failed pols in the Rumsfeld Pentagon has been the Defense Policy Board, Chaired by Richard Perle, the virulent neocon warmonger whom British Labour Party Foreign Secretary Dennis Healey dubbed the "prince of darkness" back in the 1980s. On September 19, 2001, Perle used the Defense Policy Board as the springboard for the neocon war drive against Iraq that produced an unprovoked and aggressive war in March 2003. Other members of the Defense Policy Board included: Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, Fred Ikle, James Schlesinger, Dan Quayle, Harold Brown, James Woolsey, and Newt Gingrich. Perle was eventually forced to resign, in part because of corruption charges against him stemming from Trireme Corp, and his relation with Hollinger Corp. boss Lord Conrad Black. This board of unelected and unaccountable extremist ideologues, known as the Wolfowitz cabal, needs to be urgently and permanently dissolved.

In a 19-hour meeting on September 19-20, 2001 Perle, Newt Gingrich, James Woolsey, and Wolfowitz pushed hard for an immediate operation against Iraq. Wolfowitz's plan was to have the U.S. take over southern Iraq militarily as an opposition beachhead and use the Basra oil revenues to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Perle wanted Saddam Hussein's "regime ...overthrown quickly with military force." This was too much for Powell, at least in that phase. (October 12, 2001)

PART 2 OF 2 (CH. 14 CONT'D.)

SAMUEL HUNTINGTON: IT WILL HAPPEN HERE

Samuel Huntington, in his 1981 study entitled American Politics, described the periodic explosions of the "American Creed," which he saw as a mixture of liberty, equality, individualism, and democracy." He viewed American history as punctuated by a series of periods of heightened political awareness and activity which he called "creedal passion periods." His forecast was that "if the periodicity of the past prevails, a major sustained creedal passion period will occur in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century." Huntington included the Great Awakening religious movement of the 1740s, the Revolution of 1776, the Great Revival c. 1800, the Jacksonian movement, the abolitionism of the 1850s, the Progressives, the 1968 student and antiwar movements, etc. However, Huntington blurred his attempt to look into the future by excluding from consideration social and economic upheavals like the Populists of the 1890s and the mass strikes of the 1930s. If these are included, what Huntington might call a creedal passion period might occur during the latter part of the first decade of the 21st century, i.e., between 2005 and 2010. The Carl Schmitt disciple Huntington associated this with a coming turn toward an authoritarian or fascist regime. In the next creedal ferment explosion, he wrote, "the oscillations among the responses could intensify in such a way as to threaten to destroy both ideals and institutions" in this country. This might include "the replacement of the weakened and ineffective institutions by more authoritarian structures more effectively designed to meet historical needs."

ARMAGEDDON AND APOCALYPSE IN THE US MILITARY

Although the neocons are an obvious focus of danger in the American society of today, they by no means represent the only threat. We must also pay attention to those self- styled religious factions which cultivate notions of the approaching end of the world and the return of the Messiah. These are the groups which propagate notions of the end of historical time through the apocalypse, and embellish this with the imminence of Armageddon, the mythical last battle before the end of the world. Those who profess these doctrines blatantly disregard the advice of St. Augustine, the greatest father of the Latin church, who warned Christians that it was "ridiculous" to become obsessed with the date and time of the end of the world. The modern irrationalists who camouflage themselves as Christians have left traditional Christianity behind, and have reduced the content of their religion to the cynical support of such figures as Bush and Ariel Sharon, both regarded, and perhaps accurately, as harbingers of the apocalypse.

The presence of a large mass of apocalyptic Armageddon thinkers in American life is a serious problem, since some versions of this belief structure call upon the individual to act in ways which are thought to accelerate the end time towards world catastrophe, thus speeding the return of the Messiah. The popular novels of the "Left Behind" series, which deal with life after the so-called rapture, or in-gathering of the saved elect, have fostered mass delusions on precisely this point.

Apocalyptic and Armageddon thinkers in the high ranks of the military services represent an even more serious problem than they do in the society in general. How can we let a self-styled "evangelical Christian" close to a nuclear button, when that person's demented belief structure may dictate that the launching of a rogue missile attack on Russia, China or some Arab state would bring with it the beneficial by-product of the end of the world and the creation of the kingdom of God on earth? The various fellowships and chaplaincies of evangelical-Pentecostal stamp in the US military, which are often under the influence of British or Israeli intelligence agencies, therefore represent a grave threat to US national security. Is the US officer corps reliable? Under present conditions of pervasive apocalypse-Armageddon network penetration, their reliability is open to grave doubt.

In December 2001, a senior European diplomatic source observed that the current situation in the Middle East contained the danger of a world war even before the end of that year. "If this goes much further," said the source, "we in the West will be coming closer, to a general conflict with 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. And never forget the 'Armageddon Factor,' the powerful Christian fundamentalist elements in the United States, who are applying massive pressure on the American Administration, to give full backing to the Israelis, so that the fundamentalists can achieve their Armageddon aims." (EIR, December 4, 2001)

To sample the mentality of these networks, let us hear now from General Albion Knight, US Army retired, who was the 1992 vice-presidential candidate for the US Taxpayer Party, and thus the running mate of Howard Philips on that ticket that year. We cite from Gen. Knight's essay, "Old Testament Parallels to Our Times," which was published in early 1990s by the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor:

Our current military leadership are a bunch of wimps! ... The final -- and probably the most important part of my analysis -- is following through on the implications of the claim that I (and a growing number of others) make that there is a close similarity between the conditions described in the Old Testament about the two Jewish nations, Israel and Judah, between 750 B.C. and 586 B.C. and those we see in America today. They were rotting from within at the same time they faced major external danger. Therefore, the Lord removed His protection from them, allowed them to be defeated, taken in exile and screened out to find the solid remnant of 10% which He used to rebuild. I was drawn into an intensive study of the Old Testament prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Hosea, Micah, Joel and Habakkuk. It was like reading today's newspaper they were so startlingly descriptive of today's conditions in America. From this study, I am strongly convinced that God has removed His protection from America and we shall very soon experience a series of sudden and violent crises which will shake us to our roots. They will drive us to our knees -- either in despair or prayer. I am afraid that there will be more of the despair than of the prayer. The solution given to God to those two nations was, "Stop doing the evil that you are doing and turn back to Me and I will heal your land. If not, you will have disaster on your hands." That is our message, too. Now my own attitude, from these analyses, I was put into a mood of deep despair. Yet, the Bible study also reminded me that God uses a few strong men who know who they are, whose they are, and what they ought to do. I must also admit that the words of Winston Churchill, "Never, Never, Never, Never Give up!" rang in my ear. Also the example of Howard Phillips who takes a realistic but optimistic view -- We must be prepared in case God finds use for us in His plan. So I am not throwing in the towel. (emphasis added)

Here the General expresses the common contempt for the current political and military leadership of this country, along with the idea that future US catastrophes will present well-deserved punishment for the monstrous excesses of this country. One senses that the sort of outlook would regard such cataclysmic events as 9/11 with a grim satisfaction, as proof of the efficacy of God's will and God's retribution.

In May 2000, we find another fragment, "America Betrayed," which is expressive of General Knight's views towards the close of the Clinton administration. Here we find that the Republican impeachment agitation has indeed resonated deeply among religious irrationalists of this type, and has in effect pushed Gen. Knight and his associates very far down the road of rebellion against the elected government. Gen. Knight writes: "Sex and perjury were the wrong impeachment offenses. It should have been on his [President Clinton's] treachery and failure to live up to his oath of office." Gen. Knight went on to recount that, during the Reagan years, he had been asked to draw up a program of what actions a crypto-communist American president might take if he got into power. "We concluded that a Marxist and/or communist president, if he ever came to power, would focus on the transfer of national sovereignty at every opportunity to international organizations. He or she would also weaken the armed forces physically, mentally and spiritually. The 'dumbing down' of our public school educational system would also accelerate. Furthermore, we decided that a Marxist president would assist all or most of America's enemies -- Russia, China, Cuba, radical Islam, North Korea and others. He would disregard the Constitution at every opportunity and rule by decree, meaning executive orders would earmark such an administration. Bogus arms control agreements, buying-off or intimidating Congress by stealing the FBI files of its members, controlling the media and trying to stop all alternative media would also be major goals."

Inevitably, Gen. Knight concluded that Clinton had carried out the crypto-Marxist program in full: "What has Clinton done in this regard? He has hit everyone of the above actions and more .... Clinton has helped Marxists and terrorists and their 'world revolution' at every opportunity. Cultural Marxism is also a key Clinton goal. He has been giving us a bad example that it is all right to lie, cheat, steal, threaten and even rape women if it is done in high office. There is a steady movement toward a Gestapo-like control over the people. There is today in the U.S. a total lack of any sense of nation and its protection as required by his oath-of-office. Furthermore, Clinton has been selling and giving our nuclear and other high technology secrets to communist China and giving Russia the money to re-arm at U.S. taxpayers' expense." (Anthony LoBaido, WorldNetDaily.com, May 6, 2000.)

When. General Edwin Walker gave speeches of this type to his troops in Germany in the early 1960s, he was given the sack, and Senator Fulbright denounced him as a harbinger of a threatened military coup in this country. Now active duty officers are presumably more discreet, but there are obviously many active duty officers of high rank who believe what Gen. Knight feels free to talk about. Here if anywhere was an area for the 9/11 commission to probe, but it did not do so.

These considerations lead us back to the self-styled patriot militias of the 1990s, who were so often led by retired officers with military intelligence connections. In those days, the foreign intelligence agency that was most active in fomenting militia activity was unquestionably Britain's MI-6. Today the media emphasis is on al Qaeda, and the militias are seldom heard of: But in the real world of secret intelligence operations, things move more slowly. The patriot militia networks are still there with their anti-government, right- wing anarchist, and white supremacist-xenophobic programs.

After Oklahoma City, the potential of the right-wing anti-government evangelical fanatics for terrorism and violence was re-affirmed by an armed standoff between police and "Republic of Texas" activists demanding the secession of Texas in April 1997. This insurrection was led by Richard Otto, alias "White Eagle," who put out a call inviting members of militias around the country to come to the site, armed for a shootout. The agent provocateur Otto turned out to have been "trained and set into motion by an Air Force officer who toured the world practicing New Age pagan rituals, in consultation with senior British intelligence drug-rock-sex gurus such as Gregory Bateson." Otto finally surrendered on May 3, 1997. (Tony Chaitkin, "The Militias and Pentecostalism")

Another anti-government agitator with impeccable military credentials was a certain Jim Ammerman. Ammerman was a charismatic Pentecostal who controlled various networks of chaplains in the US armed forces, in federal prisons, and in the FBI. He claimed to possess supernatural prophetic powers, and preached the imminent end of the world. According to Ammerman, the US government was illegal; in his view, Clinton deserved to be executed. During the April 1997 siege, Ammerman was brought in to mediate between the Texas separatist fanatics and the FBI. Ammerman exemplifies one of several apocalyptic networks within the US military.

A videotape popular among militia groups in the 1990s was "The Imminent Military Takeover of the United States," a speech by the Reverend Colonel Ammerman to the Prophecy Club of Topeka, Kansas. Here Ammerman warned that President Clinton, aided by masses of foreign troops he claimed were already on American soil, would soon put the nation under martial law -- if God did not end the world before the current President can act. Ammerman proclaimed that President Bill Clinton should long ago have been executed for avoiding the Vietnam draft. Ammerman, who retired in 1977 as a U .S. Army colonel and chaplain, was described by the Prophecy Club as a former Green Beret and "CIA official" with 26 years in the military and a top-secret security clearance. He was the leader of some 200 chaplains serving in the U.S. Armed Forces under the aegis of the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches. He and his chaplains were accustomed to speak in tongues and perform supernatural cures. Ammennan boasted to his audiences in those years that his chaplains were providing him with inside information about military activities ordered by what he claimed was the illegal dictatorship of the US President. ("The Militias and Pentecostalism")

In an interview granted on May 22, 1997, Colonel Ammerman stated: "There is a network of colonels and above, throughout the military, who would stand by the Constitution and against the President. They know who they are, and they are in close communication with each other. They could control the country if they need to." ("The Militias and Pentecostalism," emphasis added)

Ammerman spoke frequently in this context of the "multi-jurisdictional task force," a repeated theme in his exhortations to the militias. The military was allegedly combined, under the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with other departments of the Federal government and with local governments. When the President tried to use this overreaching military against the people, Ammerman claimed, the "good" military officers would side with armed citizens against the President. Ammerman's own organization was created at the request of an Army officer, Gen. Ralph E. Haines, Jr., General Haines had been vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army in 1967-68, and at that time was in charge of counterinsurgency preparations in the continental United States. He worked with the full resources of the Army under him, including military intelligence capabilities, to plan to cope with black ghetto riots and civil disturbances during the Vietnam War. Haines deployed combat units to Detroit and Washington, D.C., during rioting after Martin Luther King's assassination. General Haines went public in an April 11, 1968 press conference, describing his "Operation Garden Plot." He had planned and directed the military arrangements for the takeover of every single American city, and arranged the linkages between the military and Justice Department, local police, and state governments. Haines "said that detailed military planning for the summer began in February. The 'garden plot' preparations were national, he said, including 'every city you can think of.' Many officers who were to be assigned to specific cities in a military mobilization visited them in mufti [civilian clothes] to familiarize themselves with the terrain, the social and economic problems of potential riot areas, and the police with whom they would work if called, the general said." (New York Times, April 14, 1968) An admirer of the Haines-Ammerman project was the same Gen. Albion Knight, an apocalyptic co-thinker from whom we have already heard.

Militia units under the direction of military intelligence controllers have never hesitated to attack military facilities in the same way the Pentagon was attacked on 9/11. Just one example: during July 1997, a certain Bradley P. Glover and six other persons were rounded up for plotting to bomb U.S. military bases, beginning with Fort Hood, Texas. The FBI said that Glover and an associate were arrested on July 4 near Fort Hood, in possession of various weapons; others in on the alleged plot were charged with possession of pipe bombs and machine guns. The arrests allegedly resulted from Missouri state police infiltration of paramilitary groups. Glover was featured in the Wichita Eagle on April 30, 1995, as the pre-eminent Kansas militia leader. He was said to control about 1,000 armed men in the southern half of the state. In a 1995 interview, Glover said that he had initiated the militia movement in Kansas in November 1994. Glover also said he was a former Naval Intelligence officer. ("The Militias and Pentecostalism")

PRIVATE MILITARY FIRMS

Machiavelli warned the Italian princes of his day in his Arte della Guerra that unemployed mercenaries and professional soldiers would inevitably stir up coups and conflicts in order to procure jobs and glory for themselves. This warning became highly relevant at the end of the Cold War. A little later the story of Wallenstein's camp in the Thirty Years War shows that certain kinds of military activities can become self-perpetuating and totally disconnected from their original political purpose.

After Vietnam, the US military exhibited the pathologies of a defeated army. These recalled the sociological developments among the defeated or embittered forces of Germany and Italy after the First World War, when defeated veterans became one of the initial constituencies of fascism. When the Cold War ended, many of these same defeated officers became unemployed or in fear of becoming so. Defeated and unemployed military officers represent a dangerous phenomenon in any society, and today this problem is compounded by the issue of a mercenary (or all-volunteer) force. Machiavelli wrote about precisely this problem in his 1521 Art of War, in which he drew on his parallel study of the ancient world and or the events of his own tumultuous times. His conclusion was a warning which we would do well to bear in mind today:

I say ... that ... governments should fear those persons who make war their only business ... And if a prince has not enough power over his infantry to make them disband and return cheerfully to their former occupations when a war is over, he is on the road to being ruined. For no infantry can be so dangerous as that which is composed of men who make war their only calling, because a prince either must keep them continually engaged in war, or must constantly keep them paid in peacetime, or must run the risk of their stripping him of his kingdom. But it is impossible to keep them forever engaged in war, or forever paid when war is over; therefore, a prince must run no small risk of losing his kingdom. (Machiavelli 19-20)

Retired US military officers are notoriously venal; they feel that they have missed out on the chance for wealth which civilians have enjoyed. How many such military officers lost their retirement investments or were otherwise financially ruined by the crash of the NASDAQ after the spring of 2000? Probably quite a few, and here is where an acute observer like Machiavelli might start looking for desperate men, ruined by debt, with superb martial skills, who might be recruitable as mercenaries for a desperate enterprise.

Private military firms received a massive round of public attention in relation to the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal of May, 2004. According to press accounts at the time, employees of CACI in Arlington, Virginia as well as those of Titan Corporation of San Diego worked in that infamous Iraqi jail. CACI's website announced that it had taken up the task of helping US intelligence agencies worldwide in gathering information for the war on terrorism, and in analyzing and managing that information. Titan claimed that it only provided translators for Abu Ghraib, not torturers. CACI has 7,600 employees and a turnover of $845 million per year. It provided what it called interrogation specialists for places as distant as Afghanistan and Kosovo. A CACI instructor was fired at Abu Ghraib for urging military police to carry out interrogations using illegal techniques.

In the spring of 2004, there were 25,000 employees of private military firms in Iraq. In addition to the inevitable Halliburtons and Bechtels, these mercenaries included employees of Vinnell Corporation, who received the task of training the new Iraqi army. Dyncorp, a competitor of Vinnell, received the contract for training the new Iraqi police. Olive Security of the UK protected television camera crews during the war, and later turned to providing security for the construction projects of Bechtel. The leader of this security detachment was Harry Legge- Bourke, who had gone skiing with Prince Charles. Also active in Iraq was the American security firm Kroll Associates. The security firm Blackwater provided snipers who flew over Baghdad, killing Iraqis without benefit of judicial process. It was the killing of some Blackwater employees in Fallujah which provoked the epic April-May 2004 battle for that town which ended in a US defeat. The firm Custer Battles provided security along the road leading to the Baghdad Airport, a shooting gallery for passing occupation vehicles. There were other private military firms: Centurion, Global Risk, and the Stone Foundation, to name just a few. Northrop Grumman, Halliburton, and other companies developed or acquired private military firms as their corporate subsidiaries.

According to the German newsmagazine Spiegel, private military firms claim competence in all departments of warfare, including "nuclear planning." Most of the employees of the private military firms come from the retirees of the US Navy Seals, the US Army Delta Force and Rangers, and the British SAS. The vogue of the private military firm began in grand style in 1992, when then-Pentagon boss Dick Cheney awarded a contract to Brown & Root, a pillar of the US establishment and today Kellogg, Brown and Root, to determine which military jobs could best be outsourced to private firms. (Spiegel, "Die Folterer von Baghdad," May 3, 2004)

US and British intelligence operations have been in the process of privatization since the 1970s. This process was more advanced in Britain, and was given an additional impetus in the US by Reagan's Executive Order 12333, which opened the door to the privatization of virtually everything. One of the mothers of British private defense firms is the Special Air Services (SAS), the commando operation long commanded by Colonel David Stirling. The SAS are traditionally heavily Scottish, and one of their traditions is that they allegedly take no prisoners. In other words, they execute prisoners in flagrant violation of the laws of war. One is reminded of the Private Eye cover of a few years back, which appeared after a particularly blatant SAS assassination of a suspect. One SAS trooper asks the other: "Why did you shoot him 43 times?" The answer: "I ran out of bullets."

The privatized SAS system illustrates the many advantages of the private military or security firm for maintaining plausible denial in covert operations, while at the same time reducing or eliminating the oversight powers of government. The SAS has over the years spun off a series of private security and mercenary recruitment firms led by its retired or reserve-status officers. Among the first and most infamous of these was Keenie Meenie Services (KMS), whose name was taken from the Swahili term for the motion of a snake in the grass. During its heyday in the 1980s, KMS shared offices with Saladin Security, another SAS firm, next door to the 22nd SAS Regimental HQ in London. The firms were run by Maj. David Walker, an SAS South American specialist; Maj. Andrew Nightingale of SAS Group Intelligence; and Detective Ray Tucker, a former Arab affairs specialist at Scotland Yard.

Other SAS spin-off firms have included Kilo Alpha Services (KAS), directed by former SAS, Counter-Terrorism Warfare team leader Lt. Col. Ian Crooke; Control Risks, run by former SAS squadron leader Maj. Arish Turtle; and J. Donne Holdings, run by SAS counterespionage specialist H.M.P.D. Harclerode, whose firm later provided bodyguards and commando training for Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.

SAS operations under the KMS label were important during Iran- contra: in 1983, Lt. Col. Oliver North hired KMS to train the Afghan mujahideen, to mine Managua harbor in Nicaragua, and to train the Nicaraguan Contras. At the same time, KMS provided personal security for the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar, a close associate of Bush 41 and Bush 43. KMS has a long history in the Arab and Muslim world. One of its first known assignments in the 1970s, was to aid Oman in repressing a revolt in its province of Dhofar. Oman remains a de facto British colony; its officer corps is dominated by retired British officers. KMS has also worked in Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, all of which include numerous former SAS officers in their security apparatus. The security chief in Bahrain, Ian Henderson, for example, was an SAS officer in Kenya during the Mau Mau period. The Omani chief of security was a former SAS officer, as was the case in Dubai, the home of KMS official Fiona Fraser, a Stirling relative.

The relations of these SAS firms with the Iran-Contra narcotics trafficking emerged dramatically in August 1989, when reports surfaced in the British and Italian press that the Colombian Cali Cartel, historically most closely tied to the George Bush machine, had hired SAS veterans to assassinate Pablo Escobar of the rival Medellin Cartel. On Aug. 16, 1989, three days after the story broke, Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan, an opponent of the drug trade, was assassinated. Some in the Colombian government said British mercenaries were involved. Among those reportedly working for the Cali Cartel were Col. Peter McAleese, a former SAS officer in Malaysia; Alex Lenox, a former member of the SAS Counter-Terrorism Warfare task force; and David Tomkins, a veteran of Afghanistan. Among other British private military firms are also the London- based Defence Systems Ltd. and Executive Outcomes, both of which were active over a number of years in destabilizing the peace process in Angola. (Joe Brewda, "The SAS: Prince Philip's Manager of Terrorism," EIR, October 13, 1995)

Another private military firm is Aegis Defense Services Ltd., which in the summer of 2004 was awarded a $293 million contract to provide security for the US Project and Contracting Office in Iraq, the entity which is tasked with distributing $18.4 billion of US largesse there. The chief executive of Aegis is Tim Spicer, a former lieutenant colonel in the Scots Guards who has a past history of involvement in British colonial atrocities in Northern Ireland. Two soldiers under Spicer's command were convicted of murder in the 1992 shooting death of Belfast teenager Peter McBride. Spicer stubbornly defended the two murderers, despite their conviction which was confirmed on appeal in the British courts. Irish-American civil rights groups protested the awarding of the lucrative Iraq contract to Spicer. Paul O'Connor of the Pat Finucane Centre (named after the victim of an MI-5 terrorist provocateur) pointed out that Spicer evidently believed that his troops were above the law. Rev. Sean McManus of the Irish National Caucus told a reporter, "President Bush should tear up this contract immediately out of decency and respect." During the 1990s, Spicer worked for Sandline International in Papua New Guinea and Sierra Leone. In 1999 a British parliamentary inquiry found that Sandline had shipped arms into Sierra Leone in violation of a UN arms embargo. Sandline also fought a dirty war against rebels in Papua New Guinea in 1997. (Washington Post, August 9, 2004)

RAND CORPORATION NUCLEAR PLANNERS

The imagination which produced 9/11 was evidently an imagination that did not hesitate to sacrifice thousands of lives. But intellectuals ready to sacrifice not thousands but tens or even hundreds of millions of lives to the imperatives of imperial hegemony have been influential in and around the United States government for more than half a century. These are the "defense intellectuals," the nuclear planners of the RAND Corporation. These are the Strangeloves who have been studying charts marked "World Targets in Megadeaths" for many years.

One of the most influential of these was Albert Wohlstetter, who died in January, 1997 at the age of 83. According to his admirers, Wohlstetter was more influential in national affairs than Henry Kissinger, even though the later is more bombastic and more infamous. From 1960 to 1990, Wohlstetter was the premier US strategic thinker. Among his disciples, he counted leading neocons like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. At his death, Wohlstetter was lionized by Robert L. Bartley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal and, as a participant in the Olson salon, one of the prime movers in the impeachment of Clinton. Every editorial on America's geopolitical strategy that appeared in The Wall Street Journal during the previous 25 years was said to have been the product of Wohlstetter. Neocons saw Henry Kissinger as the leader of the "dove team" in foreign policy over much of this period, stressing diplomatic strategems, while in this perspective Wohlstetter was the undisputed leader of the "hawk team," which stressed military moves of breathtaking creativity and imagination.

One of Wohlstetter's best-known and most typical works was his article, "The Delicate Balance of Terror," which appeared in Foreign Affairs in January 1959. The main thesis here was that the US was very vulnerable to a Soviet first strike; an adequate US retaliation to a surprise attack was not at all assured. Wohlstetter urged his readers to support "maintaining the delicate balance of terror" with measures involving sacrifice, and to develop "a new image of ourselves in a world of persistent danger." Wohlstetter's pessimistic finale: "It is by no means certain that we shall meet the task. " (Kaplan 171 ) This is the eternal neocon refrain, from Wohlstetter to the bomber gap/missile gap to Team B and the window of vulnerability to the terrorism experts of today.

Early exponents of this school were Bernard Brodie, author of The Absolute Weapon (1946), who advocated US nuclear first use against the Soviets, and John von Neumann, the game theorist. In the intelligence unit of Curtis LeMay's Strategic Air Command there were Stefan Possony, a right- wing extremist from Hungary, and General George Keegan. Another Hungarian was Leo Szilard, an early theoretician of mutually assured destruction, or deterrence theory. Then there was Herman Kahn, the author of On Thermonuclear War (1960), who advocated nuclear first strike capabilities, limited nuclear war, fallout shelters, and generally thinking the unthinkable. The review of this book in Scientific American read: "This is a moral tract on mass murder: how to plan it, how to commit it, how to get away with it, how to justify it." (Kaplan 228)

RAND nuclear war scenarios from around 1960 called for -- depending on the kind of strategy used -- 150 million Americans dead and 60% of US industry destroyed, with 40 million Soviets dead and 40% of Soviet industry destroyed; or else 110 million Americans dead and 50% of US industry destroyed, with 75 million Soviets dead and 50% of Soviet industry gone. (Kaplan 228) A mind that could imagine this would have no trouble imagining 9/11. Fortunately, the RAND Strangeloves never got the chance to test their crackpot theories in a confrontation with the USSR. The Cuban missile crisis, the world's greatest thermonuclear confrontation, was conducted by President Kennedy in complete disregard of RAND, and of aggressive leaders like Dean Acheson and generals like Curtis Lemay and Lyman Lemnitzer, the Northwoods terrorist planner who chaired the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. The one place where RAND ideas were used was Vietnam, where a conventional version of the RAND counterforce doctrine was attempted in the form of Operation Rolling Thunder, a shock and awe exercise involving massive B-52 carpet bombing. But the utopian strategy of the RAND crackpots proved a complete failure. As Fred Kaplan wrote, "Vietnam brought out the dark side of nearly everyone inside America's national security machine. And it exposed something seamy and disturbing about the very enterprise of the defense intellectuals. It revealed that the concept of force underlying all their formulations was an abstraction, practically useless as a guide to action." (Kaplan 336) This mood of military defeat and intellectual bankruptcy is the starting point for today's neocon cabal, since this is the world toward which the Wohlstetter proteges Wolfowitz and Perle gravitated in precisely those years.

The RAND Corporation remains a sinister threat, but it also provided a rollicking farce in the run- p to the Iraq war. A special briefing on the nefarious nature of Saudi Arabia before the Defense Policy Board was ordered up by Perle, who could find no better orator than Laurent Murawiec, an undistinguished former member of my own staff in the EIR bureau in Wiesbaden, Germany during the 1980s. Despite the fact that he was by no stretch of the imagination an area specialist, Murawiec was tapped in the summer of 2002 by Perle to give a delirious PowerPoint presentation on Saudi Arabia as "the focus of evil" in the modern world. Even the Bush administration was embarrassed.

YODA: ANDREW MARSHAL, RUMSFELD'S FUTUROLOGIST

Andrew Marshal was one of Albert Wohlstetter's whiz kids at the RAND Corporation back in the 1950s. He has worked for the Defense Department for more than forty years, and is one of the last survivors of the original RAND kindergarten run by Wohlstetter. Born in 1921, the octogenarian heads up Rumsefeld's Office of Net Assessment in the Pentagon. Marshal is able to count among his proteges such figures as Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz. Marshal was a strong backer of Bush 41's Team B alternative estimates group in 1976, which was the way that Wolfowitz and other neocons prepared for their leading roles in the Reagan Administration. Marshal was also close to the ultra-right Committee on the Present Danger, where General Lyman Lemnizter, the author of Operation Northwoods, was also an activist. Lemnitzer had been encouraged to work with CPD by President Gerald Ford. Here is an important element of continuity between the Operation Northwoods clique and today's Pentagon. Marshal is no conservative; his profile is rather that of a radical right-wing reformer and Utopian thinker. He is one of many bureaucrats who has never been called to account over 9/11.

An exchange from a recent interview is typical: "Q: What's the next radical change the US will reveal on the battlefield? Marshal: One future intelligence problem: knowing what drugs the other side is on .... People who are connected with neural pharmacology say that new classes of drugs will be available relatively certainly within the decade. These drugs are just like chemicals inside people, only with behavior-modifying, performance-enhancing characteristics. [This leads to] jokes that a future intelligence problem is going to be knowing what drugs the other guys are on."

Marshal is an apostle of shock and awe: "There are ways of psychologically influencing the leadership of another state. I don't mean information warfare, but some demonstration of awesome effects, like being able to set off impressive explosions in the sky. Like, let us show you what we could do to you. Just visually impressing the person." Are we safer? Marshal opines: "A friend of mine, Yale economist Martin Shubik, says an important way to think about the world is a curve of the number of people 10 determined men can kill before they are put down themselves. That has varied over time. His claim is that it wasn't very many for a long time, and now it's going up. It's not just the US. All the world is getting less safe."

A very revealing question is this one: "Q: Did 9/11 change your mind about anything? Marshal: Not much. It was obvious that we were wide open to attack." (Douglas McGray, "The Marshal Plan," Wired Magazine, November 2002) A rather cavalier statement, since Marshal's job was supposed to be using his imagination to devise possible futuristic modes of attack against this country, and recommending timely measures to ward off such peril. If the 9/11 catastrophe was due to a failure of imagination, Marshal's Office of Net Assessment comes as close as anything to being the US government's imagination bureau. But Marshal wants no part of the responsibility for 9/11, despite having been an influential leader in the Pentagon for more than four decades.

Marshal is also associated with the view of China as a bellicose and hegemony-seeking power destined to clash with the US during the 21st century. Marshal is not surprisingly the darling of many neocon think tanks like Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, one of the nerve centers of the neocon warmonger elite in Washington. "He's as Delphic as they come -- days may go by before he utters a word," says a former member of Marshal's Office of Net Assessment. Says another: "He's hard to draw a bead on because he spends his time coming up with every conceivable future scenario that could threaten the US." Everyone except 9/11, it would seem. According to Jonathan Pollack of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, Marshal "is not very interested in the here and now, but is primarily interested in hypothesizing futures that cut against the grain, and you can argue that we really do need someone like that. His interest is to take events as they are understood and find a way to turn them on their head, to conflate understanding, and look for patterns or possibilities that could be studied. And he often comes up with quirk results. It's like he thinks of the world as a bell curve and is only interested in the tails of distribution. [He is] a worrywart." But not overly worried about 9/11, as we have seen. (Jason Vest, "The Dubious Genius of Andrew Marshal," The American Prospect Online, February 15, 2001)

The official version of 9/11 says that the attacks came out of a distant cave in Afghanistan. But it might make more sense to explore network and agencies which have means, motive, and opportunity, as well as a track record of advocating and promoting large-scale violence. Who knows what capabilities are being prepared even now in an isolated branch office of some private military firm, Armageddon network, public relations firm, or Utopian-reactionary think tank?

CHAPTER XV: ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM: FOSTERED BY US FOREIGN POLICY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PART 1 OF 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE BUSH REGIME TALKS TERROR

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

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

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

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

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

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

AZNAR'S ATTEMPTED TERROR-ASSISTED COUP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KERRY EMBRACES THE TERROR MYTH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREPARATION FOR EMERGENCY RULE

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

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

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

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

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

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

AN ORGY OF TERROR PROPAGANDA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ANGLO-AMERICAN EMPIRE IN BREAKDOWN CRISIS

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

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

THE NEOCONS UNDER ATTACK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COUNTERVAILING TENDENCIES?

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

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

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

TERRORIZING THE CONGRESS

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

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

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

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

CALLING OFF THE ELECTIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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