Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley
Posted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:35 am
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:
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:
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?
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?