Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley
Posted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:45 am
PART 1 OF 2
CHAPTER XVI: ELECTION 2004: IN THE SHADOW OF SYNTHETIC TERRORISM AND WAR
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:
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.
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.